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Section 15.12 Glossary

Glossary Glossary

Binary search.
A searching algorithm where you look through a sorted list in halves; an improvement upon linear search.
Big O Notation.
A notation computer scientists use to describe the relationship between the size of the input data and the behavior of the program, denoted with O() and some factor inside of the parenthesis.
constant time.
A Big O time complexity of O(1).
comprehension.
A specific Python construction that allows collection types to be created and filled with a single line of code.
dictionary.
A collection of key-value pairs that maps from keys to values. The keys can be any immutable type, and the values can be any type.
key.
A data item that is mapped to a value in a dictionary. Keys are used to look up values in a dictionary.
key-value pair.
One of the pairs of items in a dictionary. Values are looked up in a dictionary by key.
Linear search.
A searching algorithm where you look through in a linear order (directly from start to end).
mapping type.
A mapping type is a data type comprised of a collection of keys and associated values. Python’s only built-in mapping type is the dictionary. Dictionaries implement the associative array
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array
abstract data type.
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