Efficient Find and Replace

[Murali]

Thanks for the replies. I always thought that Python lists were
actually lists under the hood. If they are implemented as arrays of
pointers things should be a lot more efficient. In particular what I
thought was a Linear-time operation is actually an O(1) operation.

Since python allows you to replace single items with lists e.g.
L[x:x+1]= ["a","b","c"], It has to be a little more clever. But with
good data structure design I beleive that this overhead can be
amortized to O(1).

The optional argument to lst.index also makes that an linear time code.
Thanks for all the help.

- Murali

PS: Slowly python is becoming my more favourite language than even C
(except in cases you just cannot use anything but C, e.g. writing a
boot loader)