Using Counters is actually pretty cool... it's basically a sparse histogram. Can't believe I've never used 'em before -- all I've ever used from collections is

Using Counters is actually pretty cool... it's basically a sparse histogram. Can't believe I've never used 'em before -- all I've ever used from collections is OrderedDicts. Actually... I prefer the parent's solution using set(counter.items()). This way, you know that the equality tests are ordering-agnostic. It's not clear if that's the case for counters... even the docs are unclear AFAICT: http://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.Counter http://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collection...