On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
I would be +0 on making **kwargs an ordered dict automatically, and -1 on adding ***ordered_kwargs. Because kwargs is mostly used only for argument passing, and generally with only a small number of items, it probably doesn't matter too much if it's slightly slower than an unordered dict.
Yeah, simply making the kwargs dict always ordered is likely the way we would do it. That's also the only solution with any chance of working by default with the way most decorators are structured (accepting *args and **kwargs and passing them to the wrapped function). To expand on Raymond's response in the previous thread on this topic, there are likely a number of steps to this process: 1. Provide a _collections.OrderedDict C implementation 2. Create a PEP to gain agreement from other implementations (especially IronPython, PyPy and Jython) to proceed with the remaining steps 3. Make it a builtin class (odict?) in its own right (with collections.OrderedDict becoming an alias for the builtin type) 4. Update the interpreter to use the new builtin type for kwargs containers Use various microbenchmarks to check that the use of the new odict builtin type instead of a plain dict doesn't slow things down too much. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia