[Python-ideas] A sorted version of **kwargs

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> I would be +0 on making **kwargs an ordered dict automatically, and -1 on
> adding ***ordered_kwargs. Because kwargs is mostly used only for argument
> passing, and generally with only a small number of items, it probably
> doesn't matter too much if it's slightly slower than an unordered dict.

Yeah, simply making the kwargs dict always ordered is likely the way
we would do it. That's also the only solution with any chance of
working by default with the way most decorators are structured
(accepting *args and **kwargs and passing them to the wrapped
function).

To expand on Raymond's response in the previous thread on this topic,
there are likely a number of steps to this process:

1. Provide a _collections.OrderedDict C implementation
2. Create a PEP to gain agreement from other implementations
(especially IronPython, PyPy and Jython) to proceed with the remaining
steps
3. Make it a builtin class (odict?) in its own right (with
collections.OrderedDict becoming an alias for the builtin type)
4. Update the interpreter to use the new builtin type for kwargs containers

Use various microbenchmarks to check that the use of the new odict
builtin type instead of a plain dict doesn't slow things down too
much.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia