Python can be an elegant language. This is an example – a Python function that finds the anagrams for a supplied word. For the word dictionary I found one in OS X at /usr/share/dict/words.
def anagrams(wordIn):
f=open('/usr/share/dict/words')
ana=dict()
for word in f.readlines():
ana.setdefault(''.join(sorted(word.rstrip())),[]).append(word.rstrip())
return ana.get(''.join(sorted(wordIn)))
>>> anagrams("cat")
['act', 'cat']
>>>
very elegant.
one tip, for memory efficiency and simplicity, you can do the following, which reads one line at a time directly from the file, rather than creating a whole list (as in readlines).
“for word in f:”
in profiling my words file, that saves about 30MB of RAM (about 20%).
one more thing, instead of “if wordsin!=None:”, you can do “if wordsin:”, which I think is more pythonic.
Word Maker Scrabble works good for this type of thing.