Martin Marcher wrote: > On 2008-08-26 00:32:20, cnb wrote: >> Are dictionaries the same as hashtables? > > Yes, but there is nothing in there that does sane collision handling > like making a list instead of simply overwriting.
The term "collision" is rather well defined when talking about associative arrays using hashing (which python's dicts are): it means that two distinct keys produce the same hash-value, leading to a bucket collision. And of course python deals with that sanely, and creates a list of objects inside the bucket which is traversed and comparison is used to determine which actual value to retrieve. Python does not have a "one key maps to a list of values"-semantics - which I consider the sane choice... However, you can have that using the defaultdict for example: listdict = defaultdict(list) listdict[key].append(value) Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
