40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

Dictionary

Holding data as key-value pairs is important especially in distributed algorithms. In Python, a collection of these key-value pairs is stored as a data structure called a dictionary. To create a dictionary, a key should be chosen as an attribute that is best suited to identify data throughout data processing. The value can be an element of any type, for example, a number or string. Python also always uses complex data types such as lists as values. Nested dictionaries can be created by using a dictionary as the data type of a value.

To create a simple dictionary that assigns colors to various variables, the key-value pairs need to be enclosed in { }. For example, the following code creates a simple dictionary consisting of three ...