Finding an item in a list is done by searching the whole list, starting from the first item onwards.
This can be quite slow for big lists.
If you need fast lookup for a list item, use an array.
Accessing an item in an array is practically instant because there's no searching involved.
Here's how you'd get the third element from the array users:
💡 The array position starts from 0, not 1. That means that the 3rd element in an array is at position 2.
Compared to lists, dictionaries are non-sequential. This means that a dictionary item doesn't have a position.
What matters is the key. To extract a value from a dictionary you need to reference its key.
Using the same example as previously, let's extract the name:
To extract the value, we first write the name of the dictionary (my_dog), followed by a dot (.) and then the key (name). This is commonly referred to as dot notation.
Depending on the programming language, you can also extract a value using a key between square brackets:
This is usually referred to as bracket notation.
