Just van Rossum
I sometimes use an idiom like
def dictfromkeywords(**kwargs): return kwargs
d = dictfromkeywords( akey = 12, anotherkey = "foo", ...etc. )
For me it's usually spelled a shorter way: def DICT(**kw): return kw d = DICT(akey=12, anotherkey="foo") Looks nicer than the long name, IMO, and complements 'dict'.
It just occured to me that the dict constructor could easily be overloaded with this behavior: it currently takes no keyword arguments[*], so the kwargs dict could simply be used to initialize the new dict.
Usually I do not create dictionaries by calling the constructor, because I never can remember which arguments I have to use. This change would make me change my mind again to use it again, so a +1. Thomas