[Python-Dev] Hashing proposal: change only string-only dicts

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jan 18, 2012, at 08:19 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>My concern is not about breaking doctests: this proposal will also break
>them. My concern is about applications that assume that hash(s) is
>stable across runs, and we do have reports that it will break
>applications.

I am a proponent of doctests, and thus use them heavily.  I can tell you that
the issue of dict hashing (non-)order has been well known for *years* and I
have convenience functions in my own doctests to sort and print dict
elements.  Back in my Launchpad days (which has oodles of doctests), many
years ago we went on a tear to fix dict printing when some change in Python
caused them to break.  So I'm not personally worried that such a change would
break any of my own code.

Even though I hope anybody who uses doctests has their own workarounds for
this, I still support being conservative in default behavior for stable
releases, because it's the right thing to do for our users.

-Barry