John Posner added the comment:
I think it would be confusing to create of subclass of defaultdict, defining a __missing__ method in that subclass. The existence of the __missing__ method would cancel the main functionality of the defaultdict object: invoking the "default value factory" callable.
I think it would be better to encourage programmers to subclass dict directly, instead of subclassing defaultdict.
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status: pending -> open
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Python tracker
http://bugs.python.org/issue9536
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