I'd say that changing the implementation of the lookup function should be not that complicated. Marius B., do you worked on it the last time, what do you think about it?
Hi,
I think given Juha's usecase, using the htable module is probably best. You could use one htable and the two strings concatenated separated by a unused character as key. This way you will have fast O(1) lookups and you can also use strings as keys.
As Henning said, the matrix module currently only supports integer lookups, and it is used as a generic matrix container. What we could really do is change the matrix module to act as a real matrix and have O(1) lookups. The current implementation is more as an array of lists then a matrix. This way, the module could be really useful if one needs just a generic, really fast matrix lookup container. I could work on changing the lookup functionality of the module, this shouldn't be so hard to do.
Regards,
Marius