Ka-Ping Yee writes:
On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 4:01 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
But adding dictionaries is fundamentally *useful*. It is expressive.
It is useful. It's just that + is the wrong name.
First, let me say that I prefer ?!'s position here, so my bias is made apparent. I'm also aware that I have biases so I'm sympathetic to those who take a different position. Rather than say it's "wrong", let me instead point out that I think it's pragmatically troublesome to use "+". I can think of at least four interpretations of "d1 + d2" 1. update 2. multiset (~= Collections.Counter addition) 3. addition of functions into the same vector space (actually, a semigroup will do ;-), and this is the implementation of Collections.Counter 4. "fiberwise" set addition (ie, of functions into relations) and I'm very jet-lagged so I may be missing some. There's also the fact that the operations denoted by "|" and "||" are often implemented as "short-circuiting", and therefore not commutative, while "+" usually is (and that's reinforced for mathematicians who are trained to think of "+" as the operator for Abelian groups, while "*" is a (possibly) non-commutative operator. I know commutativity of "+" has been mentioned before, but the non-commutativity of "|" -- and so unsuitability for many kinds of dict combination -- hasn't been emphasized before IIRC. Since "|" (especially "|=") *is* suitable for "update", I think we should reserve "+" for some future commutative extension. In the spirit of full disclosure: Of these, 2 is already implemented and widely used, so we don't need to use dict.__add__ for that. I've never seen 4 in the mathematical literature (union of relations is not the same thing). 3, however, is very common both for mappings with small domain and sparse representation of mappings with a default value (possibly computed then cached), and "|" is not suitable for expressing that sort of addition (I'm willing to say it's "wrong" :-). Steve