ValuesView doesn't inherit from Set because the values in a dictionary can contain duplicates. That makes sense. It's just the missing Iterable, which is a weaker contract, that doesn't. I'm filing the bug tomorrow. On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jun 2016 at 13:30 Alan Franzoni <mailing@franzoni.eu> wrote:
Hello, I hope not to bother anyone with a somewhat trivial question, I was unable to get an answer from other channels.
I was just checking out some docs on ABCs for a project of mine, where I need to do some type-related work. Those are the official docs about the ValuesView type, in both Python 2 and 3:
https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.ValuesView https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html
and this is the source (Python 2, but same happens in Python 3)
https://hg.python.org/releases/2.7.11/file/9213c70c67d2/Lib/_abcoll.py#l479
I was very puzzled about the ValuesView interface, because from a logical standpoint it should inherit from Iterable, IMHO (it's even got the __iter__ Mixin method); on the contrary the docs say that it just inherits from MappingView, which inherits from Sized, which doesn't inherit from Iterable.
So I fired up my 2.7 interpreter:
from collections import Iterable d = {1:2, 3:4} isinstance(d.viewvalues(), Iterable) True
It looks iterable, after all, because of Iterable's own subclasshook.
But I don't understand why ValuesView isn't explicitly Iterable. Other ABCs, like Sequence, are explicitly inheriting Iterable. Is there some arcane reason behind that, or it's just a documentation+implementation shortcoming (with no real-world impact) for a little-used feature?
To add some extra info, both KeysView and ItemsView inherit from Set which does inherit from Iterable. I personally don't know why ValuesView doesn't inherit from Set (although Iterable does override __subclasshook__() so there isn't a direct functional loss which if this turns out to be a bug why no one has notified until now).
Alan, would you mind filing an issue at bugs.python.org about this?
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