"BJörn Lindqvist" <bjourne@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/20/07, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
2. Order in the sorting or collation sense, which I presume you mean. To reduce confusion, call this a sorted dictionary, as others have done.
Regardless, this has the problem that potential keys are not always comparable. This will become worse when most cross-type comparisons are disallowed in 3.0. So pershaps the __init__ method should require a tuple of allowed key types.
l = [(), "moo", 123, []] l.sort() l [123, [], 'moo', ()]
If it is not a problem for lists it is not a problem for ordered dictionaries.
It's about a total ordering. Without a total ordering, you won't necessarily be able to *find* an object even if it is in there.
import random a = ['b', (), u'a'] a.sort() a ['b', (), u'a'] random.shuffle(a) a.sort() a [u'a', 'b', ()]
Also, in 3.0, objects will only be orderable if they are of compatible type. str and tuple are not compatible, so will raise an exception when something like "" < () is performed.
If not already present in PyPI, someone could code an implementation and add it there. When such has be tested and achieved enough usage, then it might be proposed for addition to the collections module.
And that is how the currently considered for Python 3.0 ordered dict implementation got into Python?
I find it amusing that over the years people have argued against having an ordered dict in Python. But now, when one is considered, only THAT version with THOSE semantics, is good. The rest should go to PyPI.
No, the "ordered dict" that is making its way into Python 3.0 is specifically ordered based on insertion order, and is to make more reasonable database interfaces like... class Person(db.table): firstname = str ... Its implementation is also a very simple variant of a dictionary, which isn't the case with any tree implementation. Further, because there are *so many* possible behaviors for a dictionary ordered by keys implemented as a tree, picking one (or even a small set of them) is guaranteed to raise comments of "can't we have one that does X too?" - Josiah