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Python's Dictionary ( Dict ) Data Types

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Python’s dictionary (dict) data type is a structure composed of “‘key:value” pairs where a value is associated with a key used to look-up that value. In other languages, similar data structures are often known as associative arrays. Dictionary keys must be unique (among other keys in the dict) and immutable, but values can be mutable or immutable and can be any data type. Dictionaries themselves are mutable, which means that key:value pairs can be removed or added to dictionaries, or the value of any pair modified. Dictionaries have generally been considered “unordered” (order has actually been determined by the hash table, which is based on the specific Python implementation, and thus cannot be relied on). The hash table is actually a …show more content…

Because Python dictionaries can contain data structures like lists and other dictionaries, the information in the creatureTypes dictionary could be extensive. Each entry in the dictionary might contain a dictionary specific to that creature. These dictionaries might have keys like “stats”, “moves”, etc. Getting the value at creatureTypes[“CreatureType”][“stats”] might return a list of the stats the creature can have for each level it obtains. The list of moves a creature can learn, found at creatureTypes[“CreatureType”][“moves”] might be a list where each index in the list corresponds to a level and the item at each index is another list of moves available at that level. This game might also have a dictionary of moves, where each move’s name is a key and the value is a dictionary of that move’s attributes, such as “type” for whether the move does magic or physical damage, and “power” for how strong the attack is. I’ll note that, for the creatureTypes dictionary, I would choose to use lists over dictionaries for something that will be looked up by sequential integer values from 0 to n, such as creature stats for each level. Looking up a value in a dict by key is no faster than looking up a value in a list by index. Infact, lists look-up by index can be *slightly* faster; a dictionary look-up requires the key to be

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