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On 12 February 2015 at 18:43, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
I'm going to quote Raymond Hettinger, from a recent discussion here:
[quote] I wouldn't read too much in the point score on the StackOverflow question. First, the question is very old [...] Second, StackOverflow tends to award high scores to the simplest questions and answers [...] A high score indicates interest but not a need to change the language. A much better indicator would be the frequent appearance of ordered sets in real-world code or high download statistics from PyPI or ActiveState's ASPN cookbook. [end quote]
I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread, but why not create a function, put it on PyPI and collect usage stats from your users? If they are high enough, a case is made. If no-one downloads it because writing your own is easier than adding a dependency, that probably applies to adding it to the core as well (the "new dependency" then would be not supporting Python <3.5 (or whatever)). Converting a 3rd party function to a method on the dict class isn't particularly hard, so I'm not inclined to buy the idea that people won't use it *purely* because it's a function rather than a method, which is the only thing a 3rd party package can't do. I don't think it's a good use for an operator (neither + nor | seem particularly obvious fits to me, the set union analogy notwithstanding). Paul