On 11 Nov 2009, at 17:33 , Richard Saunders wrote:
Hey All,
We were exploring new features of Python 3.0 at our Tucson User's Group here in Tucson (TuPLE: Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts), in particular, the OrderedDict. See
http://groups.google.com/group/TuPLEgroup/browse_thread/thread/40af73f8e194a...
Has there been any discussion about making a "better" OrderedDict literal? I did some googling and didn't find anything.
Basically, the thought was there might be a place for a slightly better literal for OrderedDict in Python 3.0 od = OrderedDict([('a',1),('b':2)]) # seems clumsy
The two ideas floated were: od = ['a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3] # [ ] imply order, the ':' implies key-value
or
od = o{'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3} # { } imply dict, o implies order
Apologies if this is the wrong place for this discussion. There has been a lot of opinions flying here at work and at TuPLE which I will be happy to share if this is the right place. ;)
The first one is, I think, pretty smart considering the built-in set syntax in 3.x is the same as the dict's, except without the colons ({1, 2, 3} is a set, {'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3}). Sadly (for the proposal) since PEP 3003 on the Python Language Moratorium (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3003/) was accepted there can be no change to the language's syntax until the end of the moratorium, and this would be a syntactic alteration of the language. Your only option is therefore to stash it until the end of the moratorium (maybe take the time to try it out/implement it, and submit a full PEP with a ready-made implementation when the moratorium ends). Anyway, if you choose to take the time to implement a proof of concept during the moratorium, I personally prefer the first idea to the second one.