[Python-Dev] Non-string keys in namespace dicts

[Guido van Rossum]

On Dec 1, 2007 7:09 PM, Neil Toronto <ntoronto at cs.byu.edu> wrote:
> Are there any use-cases for allowing namespace dicts (such as globals,
> builtins and classes) to have non-string keys? I'm asking because I'm
> planning on accelerating method lookups next, and the possibility of a
> key compare changing the underlying dict could be a major pain. (It was
> a minor pain for globals.)

Since this has always worked, I suspect there are probably some
packages that depend on this. We could deprecate this however in 2.6
and forbid it in 3.0; it's easy enough to switch to string keys,
either using a unique prefix or even non-identifier characters like
'.' or '$'.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)