Dictionary as a set of counters

Suppose you are given a string and you want to count how many times each letters appears. There are several ways you do it:

1. You could create 26 variables, one for each letter of the alphabet. Then you could traverse the string and, for each character, increment the corresponding counter, probably using a chained conditional.
2. You could create a list with 26 elements. Then you could convert each character to a number (using the built-in function ord), use the number as an index into the list, and increment the appropriate counter.
3. You could create a dictionary with characters as keys and counters as the corresponding values. The first time you see a character, you would add an item to the dictionary. After that you would increment the value of an existing item.

Each of these options performs the same computation, but each of them implements that computation in a different way. An implementation is a way of performing a computation; some implementations are better than others. For example, an advantage of the dictionary implementation is that we don’t have to know ahead of time which letters appear in the string and we only have to make room for the letters that do appear. Here we can use the word list in word study.

Dictionaries have a method called get that takes a key and a default value. If the key appears in the dictionary, get returns the corresponding value; otherwise it returns the default value.

from Thinking in Python