[Python-Dev] quick poll: could int, str, tuple etc. become type objects?

[Tim Peters]

Just to reduce this to its most trivial point <wink>,

> - What should the argument to dict() be?  A list of (key, value)
>  pairs, a list of alternating keys and values, or something else?

the middle one (perhaps generalized to "iterable object alternately
producing keys and values") is most useful in practice.  Perl gets a lot of
mileage of that, e.g. think of using re.findall() to build a list of
mail-header field, value, field, value, ... thingies to feed to a dict.    A
list of (key, value) pairs is prettiest, but almost nothing *produces* such
a list except for dict.items(); we don't need another way to spell
dict.copy().