count

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> When dealing with small N, O() can get easily swamped by the constant
> factors.  How often do you deal with more than a hundred fields?

The number of fields in the OP's post was not stated.  Expecting it to
be less than 100 seems like an ill-advised presumption.  If N is
unknown, speed-tuning the case where N is small at the expense of
consuming monstrous amounts of memory when N is large sounds 
somewhere between a premature optimization and a nasty bug.