On 23 Nov 2005 01:24:46 -0800, "Kay Schluehr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Steve Holden wrote: >> > Perhaps now the answer top your question is more obvious: there is by no >> > means universal agreement on what an "ordered dictionary" should do. >> > Given the ease with which Python allows you to implement your chosen >> > functionality it would be presumptuous of the core developers to favour >> > any one of the several reasonable alternatives that might be chosen. >> > >> It seems to be though as "ordered dictionary" are slowly to be confined >> to only "ordered on order of change to the dictionary". > >While I'm only +0 for a standard odict I'm wondering that discussing >this topic leads to the auctoritative conclusion that it is unsolvable, >we have to accept infinite diversity etc. where people like me seeing a >classification immediately ( mathematical education? ) . Of course this >matter is trivial but we already know about monster-threads revolving >around decorator syntax ( including hurt souls and semi-scientific >papers ) and abandoning the print statement in Python 3.0. > I think the concept has converged to a replace-or-append-by-key ordering of key:value items with methods approximately like a dict. We're now into usability aspects such as syntactic sugar vs essential primitives, and default behaviour vs selectable modes, ISTM. E.g., it might be nice to have a mode that assumes d[key] is d.items()[k][1] when key is an integer, and otherwise uses dict lookup, for cases where the use case is just string dict keys. But feature creep is sure a threat to clean design. Regards, Bengt Richter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
