In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Aahz) wrote: > >I am surprised nobody suggested we put those two methods into a > >separate module (say dictutils or even UserDict) as functions: > > > >from dictutils import tally, listappend > > > >tally(mydict, key) > >listappend(mydict, key, value) > > That seems like a reasonable compromise.
The more messages I see on this thread, the more I think adding a different new method for each commonly used kind of update is the wrong solution. We already have methods that work pretty well and, I think, read better than the new methods: mydict[key] += 1 mydict[key].append(value) The problem is merely that they don't work when key is missing, so we need to resort to setdefault circumlocutions instead. A better solution seems to be the one I've seen suggested here several times, of changing the dict's behavior so that the setdefault is automatic whenever trying to access a missing key. If this would be in a separate module or separate subclass of dict, so much the better. -- David Eppstein Computer Science Dept., Univ. of California, Irvine http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
