On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 01:34:02PM +1300, Greg Ewing wrote:
On 27/12/20 10:15 am, Christopher Barker wrote:
It does seem like ** could be usable with any iterable that returns pairs of objects. However the trick is that when you iterate a dict, you get the keys, not the items, which makes me think that the only thing you should *need* is an items() method that returns an iterable (pf pairs of objects).
It seems to me it would be more fundamental to use iteration to get the keys and indexing to get the corresponding values. You're only relying on dunder methods then.
I think if we were designing mapping protocols now, that would be an excellent idea, but we aren't, we have decades of history from `dict` behind us. And protocols from dict use `keys()` and getitem. E.g. update. I think it would be confusing to have dict protocols use keys and double star use items, so I think it would be better to follow the API of dict.update: D.update([E, ]**F) -> None. Update D from dict/iterable E and F. If E is present and has a .keys() method, then does: for k in E: D[k] = E[k] If E is present and lacks a .keys() method, then does: for k, v in E: D[k] = v So to have an object E usable with double star dict unpacking, perhaps it needs to either: * have a keys() method which iterates over keys (assumed to all be strings), and `__getitem__`; or * support iteration, yielding (key, value) pairs. -- Steve