[Python-Dev] PEP 416: Add a frozendict builtin type

[Guido van Rossum]

To close the loop, I've rejected the PEP, adding the following rejection notice:

"""
I'm rejecting this PEP.  A number of reasons (not exhaustive):

 * According to Raymond Hettinger, use of frozendict is low.  Those
   that do use it tend to use it as a hint only, such as declaring
   global or class-level "constants": they aren't really immutable,
   since anyone can still assign to the name.
 * There are existing idioms for avoiding mutable default values.
 * The potential of optimizing code using frozendict in PyPy is
   unsure; a lot of other things would have to change first.  The same
   holds for compile-time lookups in general.
 * Multiple threads can agree by convention not to mutate a shared
   dict, there's no great need for enforcement.  Multiple processes
   can't share dicts.
 * Adding a security sandbox written in Python, even with a limited
   scope, is frowned upon by many, due to the inherent difficulty with
   ever proving that the sandbox is actually secure.  Because of this
   we won't be adding one to the stdlib any time soon, so this use
   case falls outside the scope of a PEP.

On the other hand, exposing the existing read-only dict proxy as a
built-in type sounds good to me.  (It would need to be changed to
allow calling the constructor.)
"""

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)