From: Bill Anderson [mailto:bill.anderson@libc.org]

Is it more important that they be in an order, or that they be in a specific sequential list?

Actually what is important is that they are integers and in a specific order. So the datestamp method isn't that feasible for me. (I'm trying to make a "fake tree" for a diskussion product.) It is really easy to implement and doesn't use recursion, so traversing the tree is done with a simple for loop. It uses a dictionary with tupples as keys to emulate the recursive structure. Simple example here if anybody cares. ------------------------- class fakeTree: def __init__(self): #create tree and insert root element self.treeKeys = {} self.treeKeys[0] = (0,) self.tree = {} self.tree[(0,)] = '' def insert(self, id, parent, value): # create new key keyList = list(self.treeKeys[parent]) newKeyList = keyList.append(id) newKeyTuple = tuple(newKeyList) self.treeKeys[id] = newKeyTuple # insert in tree with new tuple key self.tree[newKeyTuple] = value def print(self): sortedKeys = treeKeys.keys() sortedKeys.sort() spacesInIndent = 3 for key in sortedKeys: print key print spacesInIndent * len(key) * ' ' + treeKeys[key] tree = fakeTree() tree.insert(1, 0, 'max m') tree.insert(2, 0, 'gitte') tree.insert(3, 1, 'magnus') tree.print()