Dictionaries are extremely versatile and extensively used in the Python language. Dictionaries are implemented as hash maps and are very good at element insertion, deletion, and access; all these operations have an average O(1) time complexity.
A hash map is a data structure that associates a set of key-value pairs. The principle behind hash maps is to assign a specific index to each key so that its associated value can be stored in an array. The index can be obtained through the use of a hash function; Python implements hash functions for several data types. As ...