Reducing complexity by choosing proper data structures

To reduce the complexity of code, it's important to consider how data is stored. You should pick your data structure carefully. The following section will provide you with a few examples of how the performance of simple code snippets can be improved by the correct data types.

Searching in a list

Due to the implementation details of the list type in Python, searching for a specific value in a list isn't a cheap operation. The complexity of the list.index() method is O(n), where n is the number of list elements. Such linear complexity won't be an issue if you don't need to perform many element index lookups, but it can have a negative performance impact...