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In the sense that items() can still be used as before, it remains consistent. However since the same argument could be used to equally promote the modification of other dict functions to accept such arguments - such as keys(values_first=0) - to make the change to items() alone is (in my humble opinion) inconsistent. But that's just my opinion, others may feel differently.

To me, neither mydict.keys(values_first=whatever) nor mydict.values(values_first=whatever) make any sense: these methods return a list of only keys or only values, so saying "values first" when you're getting a list of keys is meaningless.

Oops my mistake, I was thinking along the lines of requesting a sort order based on value (i.e. keys() returns in the order of its values, increasing or decreasing). So my misunderstanding aside ;-) ... We would have the following situation (just to clarify) :

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d = { 'a' : 1 , 'b' :2, 'c':0 } itemList = d.items(values_first=1) itemList [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (0, 'c')] itemList.sort() itemList [(0, 'c'), (1, 'a'), (2, 'b')]

That is probably my preferred option for this usage. But to play devil's advocate for a minute. Considering that a dict is a key based data structure and not a sequential structure, does it really make sense to be able to request its inversion ? For example :

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d = { 'a' : [1,2,3] , 'b' : [4,5,6], 'c':[7,8,9] } d.items(values_first=1) [ ([1,2,3], 'a'), ([4,5,6], 'b'), ([7,8,9], 'c') ]

This just doesnt make sense, nor would it make sense if the values were objects. The only use case raised was for counting instances of an item in a dict, and then inverting _that_ dict (ie. the one that stored the count values) . e.g. for key in d.keys(): d[key] = d.get(key, 0) + 1 items = [(v,k) for k,v in d.items()] items.sort() items.reverse() items = [(k,v) for v,k in items] So I'll also raise again my question of whether it is reasonable to implement a functionality that is not going to be used as a part of the primary purpose of a dict. This functionality extension is just an implementation of one way of using a dict - not necessarily an example of 'missing functionality' to me.