On Wed, 15 Jan 2020 at 13:37, Hunter Jones <hjones82...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hey everyone, > > I recently used list.count() in a coding interview and the question arose > about how scale-able this solution was for sufficiently large input. > Currently, list.count iterates through the list, incrementing the count as it > goes and returning the value at the end. This does not lend itself well to > large inputs. > > I propose either modifying the list struct to include a map of item -> count, > or implementing a new structure with this information that is allocated > separately when a list is instantiated. > > Maybe I'm just seeing this since it's an edge case that I recently dealt > with, but I believe it would be a useful enhancement overall.
Personally, I don't think it's something that's needed often enough to justify the overhead on such a core Python data structure. If you have an application (or interview question!) that needs to maintain counts a lot, then I'd suggest that you might want to use a different data structure - maybe a collections.Counter, or implement your own "list plus count mapping" data structure the way you suggest. But without strong evidence that this would be used a lot, I don't think such a feature justifies the cost as part of the built in list data structure. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/P4MQZXEIQT74MZMEK7GHE2XBYY3ZL745/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
