Dictionary question.

[Terry Reedy]

"hawkesed" <olaamigoquepasa at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1114076862.063504.256970 at g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
>  I am semi new to Python. Here is my problem : I have a list of 100
> random integers. I want to be able to construct a histogram out of the
> data. So I want to know how many 70's, 71's, etc. I can't figure out
> how to do this. A dictionary is supposedly can do key value pairs
> right? I want to be able to see if say 75 is in the data structure, and
> what its value is, then increment its value as I go through the list
> finding items.
>  I am sure there is a way to do this. Is a dictionary what I should be
> using? Thanks for any help. Hope this makes sense, its getting very
> late here.

The goal of making a histogram implies that there more numbers in rlist 
than possible values in range[min(rlist), max(rlist)+1].  I would use a 
list.

freq = [0]*(rmax-rmin+1)
for i in randomlist: freq[rmin+i] += 1

You can then further combine bins as needed for a histogram.
If your distribution is sparse instead of compact, a dict would be better, 
but 'random integer [in a range]' usually implies compactness.

Terry J. Reedy