Interesting -- that code goes back a ways, so the earlier benchmarking was probably done on Python 2.4 or 2.5, which may behave differently.  For dictionaries of this small size, I suppose it doesn't matter -- but note that that table has a worst case time for dictionary lookups of `O(n)`, so it does grow as the dictionary grows.

You've convinced me this is probably ok (and obviously on legibility grounds it's no contest).