"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> writes:

Michael Hudson wrote:

...

I must admit I can't think of a situation where .firstkey would be more useful than .popkey; I thought that this discussion was discussion was inspired by the wish to write code like:

while not set.empty(): x = set.popfirstkey() ...

Maybe I'm jsut being dense, though.

Just curious: how would you get at the deleted value when using .popfirstkey() ?

You wouldn't. I was thinking of the dict-as-sets code that was being flung around earlier.

But you have a point: dict.pop() returning the first filled slot in the dictionary as tuple (key,value) would probably be most effective. It's also nice and short.

Yes.

...

FWIW, I think

dict.firstkey()

reads better than

dict.firstitem()[0]

if the former's what you're actually trying to say. Why not write

for k,_ in dict.items(): ...

? (Overstating the case slightly for effect, but I hope the point is clear).

No, the point is that you can modify the dictionary within the loop. You wouldn't see any changes using the second technique.

I was trying to make an analogy between .firstkey/.firstitem and .keys/.items - the for k,_ in dict.items(): ... was meant to be compared to for k in dict.keys(): ... Sorry for being obscure. Cheers, M. -- "declare"? my bogometer indicates that you're really programming in some other language and trying to force Common Lisp into your mindset. this won't work. -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp