On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:37 AM M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:

Asking a dict d of potentially any number of items for
existence of a particular item x is somewhat different than asking
a list l of a certain length i for the item at position i+1.

Suppose we didn't have dict.get(). I would then probably write:

val = mydict[key] if key in mydict else None

Likewise, since we don't have list.get(), I would write:

val = mylist[N] if len(mylist) >- N-1 else None

Neither of those is impractical, but in both cases .get(key) seems to express the intent in a more obvious way.

That said, it is trivial to write a get() function that does the same thing... and I've never bothered to do so. In fact, I could write a get() function that was polymorphic among mappings and sequences with very little work, which I've also never done. So I guess my case for the huge importance is undercut :-).

The dead increasingly dominate and strangle both the living and the
not-yet born. Vampiric capital and undead corporate persons abuse
the lives and control the thoughts of homo faber. Ideas, once born,
become abortifacients against new conceptions.