+1 on this, it seems very natural to me.

I don’t mean to downplay the concerns people have, but in my experience teaching newbies, dictionaries take some time to wrap their heads around anyway. So yes, they may be confused when + removes data, but they’d be confused anyway :-)

And it would be less confusing than:

{**d1, **d2}

That means pretty much nothing to a newbie, and even if they do get what ** means, it’s still some version of “put the contents of these two ducts together” — I can’t see how that is any less confusing than d1+d2.

As for expecting it to be lossless like list addition — if you don’t understand that ducts can’t have duplicate keys, you’re don’t “get” dicts anyway.

>> The problem is that dicts are complex objects with two pieces of
>> information,

And they are with or without +, of course.

> Even better, if we had two engineers (key) named Anita and Carolyn (values) and combined them into a group, do you expect one of them to vanish?

Then a dict is not the data structure in which to store this data, plain and simple.

You don’t use a key like “engineer” if you might have more than one engineer!

This is completely independent of syntax.

-CHB

Christopher Barker, PhD

Python Language Consulting
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