[Python-3000] Iterators for dict keys, values, and items == annoying :)

[Nick Coghlan]

Taro Ogawa wrote:
> [Originally misposted to python-dev]
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> There are three big use cases:
>>    dict.keys
>>    dict.values
>>    dict.items
>> Currently these all return lists, which may be expensive in terms of copying.
>> They all have iter* variants which while memory efficient, are far less 
>> convenient to work with.
> <delurk>
> Is there any reason why they can't be view objects - a dictionary has keys, 
> has values, has items - rather than methods returning view objects:
>     for k in mydict.keys:
>         ...
>     for v in mydict.values:
>         ...
>     for k, v in mydict.items:
>         ...
> For backward compatibility with Py2.x, calling them would raise a 
> DeprecationWarning and return a list.  This could even be introduced in 2.x 
> (with a PendingDeprecationWarning instead?).

Too much pain for not enough gain, IMO. The only real benefit is avoiding 
typing a couple of parentheses, but we'd be breaking an awful lot more code 
than the change of data type will break. One of the great joys of duck-typing 
is that so long as what we return is sufficiently containerish, a lot of code 
will continue to just work.

It's only code that requires an *actual* list (e.g. by indexing, slicing or 
sorting the result directly) that will need to change to wrap the method call 
in either list() or sorted().

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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