https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-June/021140.html.
I see, this is a very extended thread google did not show me when I started this one, and many good points were made there. So, my apologies I restarted this w/o reference; this discussion does seem to resurface, however. It seems it would be valuable to parallel the behaviour of operators already in place for collections. Counter: A + B adds values (calls __add__ or __iadd__ function of values, likely __iadd__ for values of A) A |= B does A.update(B) etc. -Alexander On 29 July 2014 05:21, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On 28 July 2014 19:58, Nathan Schneider <nathan@cmu.edu> wrote:
Here are two threads that had some discussion of this: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2011-December/013227.html
This doesn't seem to have a use case, other than "it would be nice".
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-June/021140.html.
This can be handled using ChainMap, if I understand the proposal.
Seems like a useful feature if there could be a clean way to spell it.
I've yet to see any real-world situation when I've wanted "dictionary addition" (with any of the various semantics proposed here) and I've never encountered a situation where using d1.update(d2) was sufficiently awkward that having an operator seemed reasonable.
In all honesty, I'd suggest that code which looks bad enough to warrant even considering this feature is probably badly in need of refactoring, at which point the problem will likely go away.
Paul