George Sakkis wrote:
> Perhaps this has been brought up in the past but I couldn't find it in
> the archives: far too often I use the idiom dict(zip(keys,values)), or
> the same with izip. How does letting dict take two positional
> arguments sound ?
> 
> Pros:
> - Pretty obvious semantics, no mental overhead to learn and remember it.
> - More concise (especially if one imports itertools just to use izip).
> - At least as efficient as the current alternatives.
> - Backwards compatible.
> 
> Cons:
- Yet Another Way To Do It
- Marginal benefit

Also note that the keyword variant is longer than the zip variant e.g.

   dict(zip(keys, values))
   dict(keys=keys, values=values)

and the relationship between the keys and values seems far less obvious 
to me in the keyword variant.

Cheers,
Brian

Brian Quinlan wrote:
> George Sakkis wrote:
>> Perhaps this has been brought up in the past but I couldn't find it in
>> the archives: far too often I use the idiom dict(zip(keys,values)), or
>> the same with izip. How does letting dict take two positional
>> arguments sound ?
>>
>> Pros:
>> - Pretty obvious semantics, no mental overhead to learn and remember it.
>> - More concise (especially if one imports itertools just to use izip).
>> - At least as efficient as the current alternatives.
>> - Backwards compatible.
>>
>> Cons:
> - Yet Another Way To Do It
> - Marginal benefit
> 
> Also note that the keyword variant is longer than the zip variant e.g.
> 
>    dict(zip(keys, values))
>    dict(keys=keys, values=values)
> 
> and the relationship between the keys and values seems far less obvious 
> to me in the keyword variant.
> 
Unfortunately

   dict(keys=keys, values=values) == {keys: values}

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden       +44 150 684 7255  +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd          http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb     http://del.icio.us/steve.holden
Blog of Note:          http://holdenweb.blogspot.com
See you at PyCon?         http://us.pycon.org/TX2007

Unfortunately

dict(keys=keys, values=values) == {keys: values}

Ummm, no: dict(keys=keys, values=values) == {'keys': keys, 'values': values}