Christoph Zwerschke wrote: > I still believe that the concept of an "ordered dictionary" ("behave > like dict, only keep the order of the keys") is intuitive and doesn't > give you so much scope for ambiguity.
Sure. Others think so too. The problem is that if you and these other people actually write down exactly how this unambigous ordered dict should behave, you'll end up with a dozen different sets of semantics, which can be divided in at least three main groups. People use different idioms, and often gather collections of classes and functions that fit their style of coding and their typical problem domains. There is nothing wrong with that, and they might well be made publically available if they are more generally useful. When adding things to the standard library, there are some more things to consider, particularly for something general such as an odict class: Is is general enough, and does it add enough value to outweigh the increased cognitive burden of more classes/functions/types in the library? For a beginner, it's easy to believe that things would be easier if the tool you use had already solved the problem you have at hand for you, but it turns out that the world has so many problems, that you would end up with a impenetrable forest of standard library modules if we actually tried to achieve this. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list