List or Dictionairy or neither?

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> Hey, that sounds rather good to me. I'll think about the database,
    >> too.  But somehow I like this 'homemade' approach a little
    >> better. ;-)

    Andrae> Now my curiosity is piqued.  Why would you possibly prefer the
    Andrae> non-standard, probably less efficient, more complicated, and
    Andrae> probably buggier "write your own database" solution over the far
    Andrae> simpler "use dbm/msql"?

I'll offer why I went so long before switching from a homegrown database to
MySQL.  For a long time I used libdb with my own homegrown query system
thrown on top of it.  Performance was and still is the prime consideration.
I switched to MySQL about a year ago and have been trying to regain my old
performance levels ever since.  I switched for two reasons: generality and
maintainability.  I was able to toss out a lot of code and now have a system
that is both much easier to extend and much better normalized (in the
database sense of the term).

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com)
http://www.mojam.com/
http://www.musi-cal.com/