"Steven Bethard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Ahh, ok. Now I understand. I think you could probably search the python-dev archives and see why the decision was made as it was. For pretty much all my purposes, "key in dict" is much more useful than "item in dict". Practicality beats Purity and all. ;)
In '[for] x in mydict:', x could potentially be key, value, or item-pair. All three were considered and discussed -- I believe on clp-- and key chosen as the most useful. A specific analogy brought forth was the phone book, a mapping of names to phone number and maybe address. The decision was definite closer to a coin-toss to a no-brainer.
I actually use the item-pair more frequently, but it's not something that concerns me overmuch. I don't really worry about a few extra keystrokes; just a whole lot of extra keystrokes.
John Roth
Terry J. Reedy
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