cataloging words in text file

[Stephen Boulet]

I remember this homework assignment for my data structures (c++)
class: read in a large file, and create a data structure containing
every word in the file and the number of times it appears.

I was wondering how to do this in python. In c++ we had to do it
with hash tables and b-trees.

Can you do it with dictionaries in python, with the key as the word
and the data the number of times it appears? If there's any
documentation in this problem domain that people could point out to
me I would appreciate it.

What about if you had a bunch of objects, like say stars, with
attributes like position (two coordinates), magnitude, color. If you
had to sort a bunch of them at a time by attributes (say at most
10^3 of them), would using dictionaries be a good idea, or should
you start looking at interfaces to, for example, mysql?

Thanks.

-- Stephen