[Python-Dev] Dict access with double-dot (syntactic sugar)

[Santoso Wijaya]

I just want to chip in that, as far as syntactic sugar go, `somedict:foo`
looks better than `somedict..foo`.

2c...

~/santa


On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

> "class attrdict" is a perennial dead-end for intermediate pythonistas who
> want to save 3 characters/5 keystrokes for item access. Other languages such
> as javascript allow "somedict.foo" to mean the same as "somedict['foo']", so
> why not python? Well, there are a number of reasons why not, beginning with
> all the magic method names in python.
>
> But saving keystrokes is still a reasonable goal.
>
> So what about a compromise? Allow "somedict..foo", with two dots, to take
> that place. It still saves 2 characters (often 4 keystrokes; and I find even
> ', "[", or "]" harder to type than ".").
>
> The "foo" part would of course have to obey attribute/identifier naming
> rules. So there would be no shortcut for "somedict['$#!%']". But for any
> identifier-legal foo, the interpreter would just read ..foo as ['foo'].
>
> I would not be surprised if I'm not the first person to suggest this. If
> so, and there's already well-known reasons why this is a bad idea, I
> apologize. But if the only reason not to is "we never did it that way
> before" or "it would be too addictive, and so people would never want to use
> older python versions" or "headache for tools like pylint", I think we
> should do it.
>
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