Python Language Tutorial => Container and sequence types

Example

It is possible to emulate container types, which support accessing values by key or index.

Consider this naive implementation of a sparse list, which stores only its non-zero elements to conserve memory.

class sparselist(object):
    def __init__(self, size):
        self.size = size
        self.data = {}
    
    # l[index]
    def __getitem__(self, index):
        if index < 0:
            index += self.size
        if index >= self.size:
            raise IndexError(index)
        try:
            return self.data[index]
        except KeyError:
            return 0.0

    # l[index] = value
    def __setitem__(self, index, value):
        self.data[index] = value

    # del l[index]
    def __delitem__(self, index):
        if index in self.data:
            del self.data[index]

    # value in l
    def __contains__(self, value):
        return value == 0.0 or value in self.data.values()

    # len(l)
    def __len__(self):
        return self.size

    # for value in l: ...
    def __iter__(self):
        return (self[i] for i in range(self.size)) # use xrange for python2

Then, we can use a sparselist much like a regular list.

l = sparselist(10 ** 6)  # list with 1 million elements
0 in l                   # True
10 in l                  # False

l[12345] = 10            
10 in l                  # True
l[12345]                 # 10

for v in l:
    pass  # 0, 0, 0, ... 10, 0, 0 ... 0

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Python Language Overloading Container and sequence types

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