[Python-Dev] ValuesView abc: why doesn't it (officially) inherit from Iterable?

[Alan Franzoni]

ValuesView doesn't inherit from Set because the values in a dictionary
can contain duplicates. That makes sense. It's just the missing
Iterable, which is a weaker contract, that doesn't.

I'm filing the bug tomorrow.

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jun 2016 at 13:30 Alan Franzoni <mailing at franzoni.eu> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>> I hope not to bother anyone with a somewhat trivial question, I was
>> unable to get an answer from other channels.
>>
>> I was just checking out some docs on ABCs for a project of mine, where
>> I need to do some type-related work. Those are the official docs about
>> the ValuesView type, in both Python 2 and 3:
>>
>> https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.ValuesView
>> https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html
>>
>> and this is the source (Python 2, but same happens in Python 3)
>>
>>
>> https://hg.python.org/releases/2.7.11/file/9213c70c67d2/Lib/_abcoll.py#l479
>>
>> I was very puzzled about the ValuesView interface, because from a
>> logical standpoint it should inherit from Iterable, IMHO (it's even
>> got the __iter__ Mixin method); on the contrary the docs say that it
>> just inherits from MappingView, which inherits from Sized, which
>> doesn't inherit from Iterable.
>>
>> So I fired up my 2.7 interpreter:
>>
>> >>> from collections import Iterable
>> >>> d = {1:2, 3:4}
>> >>> isinstance(d.viewvalues(), Iterable)
>> True
>> >>>
>>
>> It looks iterable, after all, because of Iterable's own subclasshook.
>>
>> But I don't understand why ValuesView isn't explicitly Iterable. Other
>> ABCs, like Sequence, are explicitly inheriting Iterable. Is there some
>> arcane reason behind that, or it's just a documentation+implementation
>> shortcoming (with no real-world impact) for a little-used feature?
>
>
> To add some extra info, both KeysView and ItemsView inherit from Set which
> does inherit from Iterable. I personally don't know why ValuesView doesn't
> inherit from Set (although Iterable does override __subclasshook__() so
> there isn't a direct functional loss which if this turns out to be a bug why
> no one has notified until now).
>
> Alan, would you mind filing an issue at bugs.python.org about this?



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