On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 6:34 AM Samuel Freilich via Python-ideas <python-ideas@python.org> wrote:
The message does not include:

* The word "hashable" verbatim, which appears in the glossary

That's a pretty good entry that does talk about the importance of hashability in dicts and sets. So making it easier to find might be enough to help here.

So +1 on adding that link to the error message (if, in fact, links in error messages are on the table at all -- do any existing built in error message have links in them?

and/or at least add "unhashable" to the glossary -- after all, both "mutable" and "immutable" are in there.

-CHB







 
* A suggestion of what to do instead

For example:
TypeError: dict keys must be hashable (https://docs.python.org/glossary.html#term-hashable), 'list' is not. Consider using a primitive type (e.g. int, str) or immutable sequence (e.g. tuple, frozenset).

(That could be too much stuff, my point is I think there's room for improvement over "unhashable type: 'list'".)

I filed a bug about this (https://bugs.python.org/issue41114), but it was closed by a core contributor, who suggested discussing that on this list instead. While it's true that you can Google the error message and find the relevant information, I think the error message text would be worth improving.

Peace,
-Sam
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