basic question, sorry

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <Fzn7xn.I8v at world.std.com>, Will Ware <wware at world.std.com> wrote:
>
>Yeah, that occurred to me about a half-second after I posted that
>response. in...keys() would work but would impose a huge performance
>lose. (I try to think a little more carefully when writing code
>that I plan to actually run.) The try/except thing looks interesting,
>I'll have to study the later comment that it's substantially faster
>than has_key().

It is substantially faster IFF the key already exists "most" of the time
(I'll guess somewhere around the 80%-90% level).  try clauses are
extremely fast; triggering the except is slow.
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