On Mon 12/16/19, 9:59 AM, "David Mertz" <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
Admittedly, I was only lukewarm about making an insertion-order guarantee for dictionaries too. But for sets I feel more strongly opposed. Although it seems unlikely now, if some improved implementation of sets
had the accidental side effects of making them ordered, I would still not want that to become a semantic guarantee.
Eek… No accidental side effects whenever possible, please. People come to rely upon them (like that chemistry paper example[*]), and changing the assumptions results in a lot of breakage down the line. Changing the length of AWS identifiers
(e.g. instances from i-1234abcd to i-0123456789abcdef) was a huge deal; even though the identifier length was never guaranteed, plenty of folks had created database schemata with VARCHAR(10) for instance ids, for example.
Break assumptions from day 1. If some platforms happen to return sorted results, sort the other platforms or toss in a
sorted(key=lambda el: random.randomint()) call on the sorting platform. If you’re creating custom identifiers, allocate twice as many bits as you think you’ll need to store it.
Yes, this is bad user code, but I’m all for breaking bad user code in obvious ways sooner rather than subtle ways later, especially in a language like Python.