Confusion about dictionaries - keys use value or identity?

[Alex Martelli]

"Roy Smith" <roy at panix.com> wrote in message
news:roy-58C72C.12353708072001 at news1.panix.com...
    ...
> Is there a way to force the comparison to be by identity?  I'm
> contemplating building a cache (using a dictionary), and key comparison by
> identity should be significantly faster than by value, because I'm going
to
> be using rather long strings as keys.

You could try using the built-in function intern() on all strings involved.

That may cost you not a little memory (which garbage collection will
not recover) but there could be a substantial speed gain -- try it...


Alex