[js2]

If a document is something not hashable, you can make results a dictionary

Huh? Dictionary keys have to be hashable. Oh, maybe you mean coming up with a hashable key for each result, then just taking the values at the end. Something like:

    # A set of all the documents
    all_docs = dict(doc.key, doc for doc in dictionary.all_docs())

    # A set of the documents matching `operand`
    results = set(doc.key for doc in get_results(operand, dictionary, pfile, force_list=True))

    return [all_docs[key] for key in all_docs if key not in results]

(This loses the "sorted" property the author has in the original comments. If that's important, just make all_docs an OrderedDict.)

[habitue]

Yeah, that was what I was talking about. Without typing up an example its cumbersome to explain. But the idea is use a constant time access data structure. The easiest would be a set, but if (as I suspect) the documents are dicts, you'd need to lookup by a hashable key.

Thanks for giving the example

[js2]

It may be faster to change the last line to:

    return [all_docs[key] for key in set(all_docs) - results]