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On Thu, 21 Mar 2019 at 17:27, Rémi Lapeyre <remi.lapeyre@henki.fr> wrote:
Le 21 mars 2019 à 17:43:31, Steven D'Aprano (steve@pearwood.info(mailto:steve@pearwood.info)) a écrit:
I'd like to make a plea to people:
I get it, there is now significant opposition to using the + symbol for this proposed operator. At the time I wrote the first draft of the PEP, there was virtually no opposition to it, and the | operator had very little support. This has clearly changed.
At this point I don't think it is productive to keep making subjective claims that + will be more confusing or surprising. You've made your point that you don't like it, and the next draft^1 of the PEP will make that clear.
But if you have *concrete examples* of code that currently is easy to understand, but will be harder to understand if we add dict.__add__, then please do show me!
For those who oppose the + operator, it will help me if you made it clear whether it is *just* the + symbol you dislike, and would accept the | operator instead, or whether you hate the whole operator concept regardless of how it is spelled.
Thanks for the work you are doing on this PEP and for debunking my misconceptions regarding types, I’m currently learning a lot about them.
I don’t know if it matters but I’m in favor of the method
And to those who support this PEP, code examples where a dict merge operator will help are most welcome!
Not matter the notation you end up choosing, I think this code: https://github.com/jpadilla/pyjwt/blob/master/jwt/utils.py#L71-L81
which is part of a widely used library to validate JWTs would greatly benefit from a new merge to merge dicts. (This package is 78 on https://hugovk.github.io/top-pypi-packages/)
It's already got a function that does the job. How much benefit is there *really* from being able to replace it with d1 + d2 once you drop support for Python < 3.8? But point taken that new code would have been able to avoid the function in the first place. ... or would it? def merge_dict(original, updates): if not updates: return original With the + operator. d1 + None will fail with an error. With your code, updates=None means "return the original unchanged". Does that matter with your current code? The point is that in many real world cases, you'd write a function *anyway*, to handle corner cases, and a new operator doesn't make much difference at that point. Having said all of that, I'm mostly indifferent to the idea of having a built in "dictionary merge" capability - I doubt I'd use it *much*, but if it were there I'm sure I'd find useful it on the odd occasion. I'm somewhat against an operator, I really don't see why this couldn't be a method (although the asymmetry in d1.merge(d2) makes me have a mild preference for a class method or standalone function). I can't form an opinion between + and |, I find | significantly uglier (I tend to avoid using it for sets, in favour of the union method) but I am mildly uncomfortable with more overloading of +. Serious suggestion - why not follow the lead of sets, and have *both* an operator and a method? And if you think that's a bad idea, it would be worth considering *why* it's a bad idea for dictionaries, when it's OK for sets (and "well, I didn't like it when sets did it" isn't sufficient ;-)) And having said that, I'll go back to lurking and not really caring one way or the other. Paul