"PEP509 added a private version number... every dictionary has a version number, and elsewhere in memory a master version counter. And when you go and change a dictionary the master counter is incremented from a million to a million and one, and that value a million and one is written into the version number of that dictionary. So what this means is that you can come back later and know if it's been modified, without reading maybe its hundreds of keys and values: you just look and see if the version has increased since the last time you were there."