[New-bugs-announce] [issue24685] collections.OrderedDict collaborative subclassing

[Eric Frederich]

New submission from Eric Frederich:

After watching the PyCon talk Super considered super[1] and reading the corresponding blog post[2] I tried playing with dependency injection.

I was surprised to notice that the example he gave did not work if I swap the order of the classes around.  I think it should have.  See attached file.

I think this is a bug in collections.OrderedDict
OrderedDict is not well-behaved as far as cooperative subclassing is concerned.

The source code is hard wired with a keyword argument dict_setitem=dict.__setitem__ which it then calls at the end with dict_setitem(self, key, value)

A quick search of github for dict_setitem shows that this
bad practice seems be making its way into other projects

If dict_setitem keyword arg is really necessary to have, then maybe:

    (a) have it default to None
    (b) at the end of __setitem__ do something like:

        if dict_setitem is not None:
            return dict_setitem(self, key, value)
        
        super(OrderedDict, self).__setitem__(key, value)

After a discussion on #py-dev this seemed like a reasonable request (not necessarily the implementation, but the idea that OrderedDict should cooperate).
I tested this against the C implementation of OrderedDict in Python 3.5 and noticed that it doesn't cooperate either.


[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiOglTERPEo
[2] https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/super-considered-super/

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: inj.py
messages: 247136
nosy: eric.frederich, eric.snow, rhettinger
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: collections.OrderedDict collaborative subclassing
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.5
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file39982/inj.py

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue24685>
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