[Python-Dev] One more dict trick

[Tim Peters]

[EAR]
> You've got a point...

Well, really, they do -- but they had a much more compelling point when the
Cold War came with an unlimited budget.

> but I don't think it's really economical to build that kind of
> hardware into general-purpose processors.

Economical?  The marginal cost of adding even nutso new features in silicon
now for mass-market chips is pretty close to zero.  Indeed, if you're in the
speech recog or 3D imaging games (i.e., things that still tax a PC), Intel
comes around *begging* for new ideas to use up all their chip real estate.
The only one I recall them turning down was a request from Dragon's founder
to add an instruction that, given x and y, returned log(exp(x)+exp(y)).
They were skeptical, and turned out even *we* didn't need it <wink>.

> You end up with a camel.  You know, a horse designed by committee?

Yup!  But that's the camel Intel rides to the bank, so it will probably grow
more humps, on which to hang more bags of gold.