Published at LXer:

Somebody hit lists with gamma rays. Okay, so Dictionaries aren't the Incredible Hulk, but they are supercharged in what they can do. In other languages, dictionaries are referred to as hashes, associative arrays, and associative lists. It's probably best to think of them as associative lists because that's exactly what they are. Dictionaries are lists that associate two values with one another. To think of it in terms of an actual dictionary, they associate a word, or key with a definition, or value. They function sort of like a list with custom indexes.

Read More...