Mark Janssen wrote:

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

A dictionary would (then) be a SET of these. (Voila! things have already gotten simplified.)

Really? So {a:1, a:2} would be a dict of length 2?

...

Eventually, I also think this will seque and integrate nicely into Mark Shannon's "shared-key dict" proposal (PEP 412).

I just noticed something in Guido's example. Something gives me a strange feeling that using a variable as a key doesn't smell right. Presumably Python just hashes the variable's id, or uses the id itself as the key, but I wonder if anyone's noticed any problems with this, and whether the hash collision problems could be solved by removing this?? Does anyone even use this functionality -- of a *variable* (not a string) as a dict key?

Um, yes? As in, most of the time. Don't you? And Python uses whatever object the name is bound to: --> huh = 5 --> d = {} --> d[huh] = 'hrm' --> d {5: 'hrm'} ~Ethan~

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:08:23PM -0700, Mark Janssen wrote:

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

A dictionary would (then) be a SET of these. (Voila! things have already

...

gotten simplified.)

Really? So {a:1, a:2} would be a dict of length 2?

Eventually, I also think this will seque and integrate nicely into Mark

...

...

Shannon's "shared-key dict" proposal (PEP 412).

I just noticed something in Guido's example. Something gives me a strange feeling that using a variable as a key doesn't smell right. Presumably Python just hashes the variable's id, or uses the id itself as the key, but I wonder if anyone's noticed any problems with this, and whether the hash

collision problems could be solved by removing this?? Does anyone even use this functionality -- of a *variable* (not a string) as a dict key?

mark

Using a variable as a key is valid since the object itself is used for a key. There've been times when I've used ints as keys but beyond that nothing else (besides strings).

Mark Janssen wrote:

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

A dictionary would (then) be a SET of these. (Voila! things have already gotten simplified.)

Really? So {a:1, a:2} would be a dict of length 2?

...

Eventually, I also think this will seque and integrate nicely into Mark Shannon's "shared-key dict" proposal (PEP 412).

I just noticed something in Guido's example. Something gives me a strange feeling that using a variable as a key doesn't smell right. Presumably Python just hashes the variable's id, or uses the id itself as the key, but I wonder if anyone's noticed any problems with this, and whether the hash collision problems could be solved by removing this?? Does anyone even use this functionality -- of a *variable* (not a string) as a dict key?

Um, yes? As in, most of the time. Don't you? And Python uses whatever object the name is bound to: --> huh = 5 --> d = {} --> d[huh] = 'hrm' --> d {5: 'hrm'} ~Ethan~

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:08:23PM -0700, Mark Janssen wrote:

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

A dictionary would (then) be a SET of these. (Voila! things have already

...

gotten simplified.)

Really? So {a:1, a:2} would be a dict of length 2?

Eventually, I also think this will seque and integrate nicely into Mark

...

...

Shannon's "shared-key dict" proposal (PEP 412).

I just noticed something in Guido's example. Something gives me a strange feeling that using a variable as a key doesn't smell right. Presumably Python just hashes the variable's id, or uses the id itself as the key, but I wonder if anyone's noticed any problems with this, and whether the hash

collision problems could be solved by removing this?? Does anyone even use this functionality -- of a *variable* (not a string) as a dict key?

mark

Using a variable as a key is valid since the object itself is used for a key. There've been times when I've used ints as keys but beyond that nothing else (besides strings).