At 02:19 PM 6/15/2008 +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
Ordered dicts, dicts that remember the chronological order of their insertion, don't sound generally useful.
They are generally useful in any case where you want to handle key-value pairs while not confusing a human operator by messing up the original order. Think e.g. configuration files. A common complaint against ConfigParser is that writing a configuration file does not preserve the order of the original file, which is harmless for the computer but very annoying for the human being who maintains that file.
You don't need an ordered dictionary for that; you need a save routine that stream-edits the old file contents. That way, you don't lose comments and spacing either. As for the other uses for ordered dictionaries, I find it simplest to just use a list of key,value pairs, and only transform it to a dictionary or dictionary-like structure as needed, using tools like the cgi module, the email package, or wsgiref.headers.