On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 5:46 PM Erik Demaine <edemaine@mit.edu> wrote:

Have folks thought about allowing indexing dictionary views as in the
following code, where d is a dict object?

d.keys()[0]
d.keys()[-1]
d.values()[0]
d.values()[-1]
d.items()[0]
d.items()[-1] # item that would be returned by d.popitem()

since dicts were made order-preserving, indexing the keys, items, etc does make some sense.

> I've also often wanted to get an arbitrary item/key from a dictionary, and

This is indeed one of the use cases identified.

I found some related discussion in
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/thread/QVTGZD6USSC34D4IJG76UPKZRXBBB4MM/
but not this exact idea.

That's a pretty different idea but this exact idea has been discussed on this list relatively recently. I still like it, but there wan't much general support.

I'll leave it exercise for the read to find that thead, but it is there, and I suggest you look for it if you want to further pursue this idea.

-CHB

Christopher Barker, PhD (Chris)

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