[Python-Dev] tally (and other accumulators)
Alex Martelli
aleaxit at gmail.com
Tue Apr 4 17:17:57 CEST 2006
On Apr 4, 2006, at 8:01 AM, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> On 4/4/06, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> import collections
>> def tally(seq):
>> d = collections.defaultdict(int)
>> for item in seq:
>> d[item] += 1
>> return dict(d)
...
> Putting it somewhere in collections seems like a great idea.
> defaultdict is a bit odd, because the functionality doesn't have
> anything to do with defaults, just dicts. maybe a classmethod on
> regular dicts would make more sense?
Good points: it should probably be a classmethod on dict, or a
function in module collections.
> I write this function regularly, so I'd be happy to have it
> available directly.
Heh, same here -- soon as I saw it proposed on c.l.py I recognized an
old friend and it struck me that, simple but widely used, it should
be somewhere in the standard library.
Alex
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