[Python-Dev] Making mutable objects readonly

[Skip Montanaro]

    MAL> This thread is an offspring of the "for something in dict:" thread.
    MAL> The problem we face when iterating over mutable objects is that the
    MAL> underlying objects can change. By marking them read-only we can
    MAL> safely iterate over their contents.

I suspect you'll find it difficult to mark dbm/bsddb/gdbm files read-only.
(And what about Andy Dustman's cool sqldict stuff?)  If you can't extend
this concept in a reasonable fashion to cover (most of) the other objects
that smell like dictionaries, I think you'll just be adding needless
complications for a feature than can't be used where it's really needed.

I see no problem asking for the items() of an in-memory dictionary in order
to get a predictable list to iterate over, but doing that for disk-based
mappings would be next to impossible.  So, I'm stuck iterating over
something can can change out from under me.  In the end, the programmer will
still have to handle border cases specially.  Besides, even if you *could*
lock your disk-based mapping, are you really going to do that in situations
where its sharable (that's what databases they are there for, after all)?  I
suspect you're going to keep the database mutable and work around any
resulting problems.

If you want to implement "for key in dict:", why not just have the VM call
keys() under the covers and use that list?  It would be no worse than the
situation today where you call "for key in dict.keys():", and with the same
caveats.  If you're dumb enough to do that for an on-disk mapping object,
well, you get what you asked for.

Skip