Everything about Dictionaries

The talk will focus on Dictionaries - fundamentals followed by the internal look up.

The talk deals with many feature and options presented by Python dictionaries, and their wide-spread use internally. It also deal with the Optimizations which are largely algorithmic and their effect on benchmarks. lastly it covers the newly added features in Py3k.

• Dictionary fundamentals
• Simple use-cases
• Python implementation of Dictionary
• Best case/worst case scenarios (speed of lookup)
• How dict is also an iterator
• The "dict" type
• Special-case optimization for small hashes
• Collision protection
• Dynamic changes
• Improvements in Py3k
• Conclusion

Shashwat is a final year engineering student pursuing Information Technology from Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad. He has been using python since an year, participates actively in mailing-lists (c-l-p, python-tutor), submit patches and comment on roundup (Python bug tracker), had made some applications using python and is currently working on one of core python-dev tasks i.e. rewriting python email library as a part of Google Summer of Code program.