[Python-ideas] A sorted version of **kwargs

Don Spaulding donspauldingii at gmail.com
Thu Jan 20 05:29:26 CET 2011


Hi there python-ideas!

Does it bother anyone else that it's so cumbersome to instantiate an
OrderedDict with ordered data?

    >>> from collections import OrderedDict
    >>> OrderedDict(b=1,a=2)
    OrderedDict([('a', 2), ('b', 1)])          # Order lost. Boooo.
    >>> OrderedDict([('b',1),('a',2)])
    OrderedDict([('b', 1), ('a', 2)])

Obviously, OrderedDict's __init__ method (like all other functions) never
gets a chance to see the kwargs dict in the order it was specified.  It's
usually faked by accepting the sequence of (key, val) tuples, as above.  I
personally think it would be nice to be able to ask the interpreter to keep
track of the order of the arguments to my function, something like:

    def sweet_function_name(*args, **kwargs, ***an_odict_of_kwargs):
        pass

I'm not married to the syntax.  What do you think about the idea?
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