Third party data structures

Key 3: Using third-party data structures.

Python has a good bunch of data structures in the core language/library. But sometimes, an application has very specific requirements. We can always use third-party data-structure packages. Most of such modules are Python wrapper over C, C++ implementations:

• The blist module provides a drop-in replacement for list, sortedList, and sortedset. It is discussed in greater detail in later chapters.
• The bintrees module provides binary, AVL tree, and Red-Black trees.
• The banyan module provides Red-Black trees, splay tree, and sorted lists.
• The Sortedcontainers module provides SortedList, SortedDict, and SortedSet. So, one can get almost every data structure for Python easily. More stress should be given on why one data structure is better than another for a use case.

Arrays/List

For numeric calculations involving math, NumPy arrays should be considered. They are fast, memory-efficient, and provide many vector and matrix operations...