Execution speed question

[Suresh Pillai]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:44:18 +0200, Suresh Pillai wrote:

> Since I am doing A LOT of loops over the nodes and the number of nodes
> is also huge, my concern using sets is that in order to iterate over the
> set in each step of my simulation, the set items need to be converted to
> a list every time.  So while removal from a set is much cheaper than say
> from a list, what about this conversion overhead in order to iterate
> over the items.

I could of course use the old trick of using a dictionary with 'None' 
values and then using iterkeys().  But I thought sets were supposed to 
replace this.  So maybe I should be asking a more basic question: is 
there any way to iterate over the items in a set other than converting to 
a list or using the pop() method.