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On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 10:29 PM Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka@gmail.com> wrote:
It is not that I like to add an operator for dict merging, but dicts are more like sets than sequences: they can not contain duplicated keys and the size of the result of merging two dicts can be less than the sum of their sizes. Using "|" looks more natural to me than using "+". We should look at discussions for using the "|" operator for sets, if the alternative of using "+" was considered, I think the same arguments for preferring "|" for sets are applicable now for dicts.
I concur with Serhiy. While I don't like adding operator to dict, proposed +/- looks similar to set |/- than seq +/-. If we're going to add such set-like operations, operators can be: * dict & dict_or_set * dict - dict_or_set * dict | dict Especially, dict - set can be more useful than proposed dict - dict.
But is merging two dicts a common enough problem that needs introducing an operator to solve it? I need to merge dicts maybe not more than one or two times by year, and I am fine with using the update() method.
+1. Adding new method to builtin should have a high bar. Adding new operator to builtin should have a higher bar. Adding new syntax should have a highest bar. -- INADA Naoki <songofacandy@gmail.com>