[Tutor] searching for a value in an array

Scot W. Stevenson scot@possum.in-berlin.de
Fri, 6 Sep 2002 01:50:49 +0200


Hello Danny, 
	
> There are faster ways of seeing if someone is present in a group of
> people: we can use a dictionary:

And, just in case anybody is getting funny ideas about Python becoming  
stable any time soon, in Python 2.3, you will be able to use "sets" 
instead. If I understand the concept, these unordered collections would be 
even better here, because they are "hashable" (which seems to be 
computerspeak for "the Python Elves can access them really, really 
quickly, and their speed doesn't depend on the number of elements") so you 
don't have to use those dummy 1's as values of a dictionary like you did 
in your example.

What will they ever think of next =8).

Y, Scot


-- 
   Scot W. Stevenson wrote me on Friday, 6. Sep 2002 in Zepernick, Germany    
       on his happy little Linux system that has been up for 1919 hours       
        and has a CPU that is falling asleep at a system load of 0.00.