Best way to handle large lists?

[Fredrik Lundh]

Hari Sekhon wrote:

> So are you saying that using a dict means a faster search since you only
> need to look up one value?
>
> I would think that you would have to look through the keys and stop at
> the first key that matches since each key has to be uniq, so perhaps if
> it is nearer the front of the set of keys then perhaps it would be a
> quicker lookup?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table

</F>