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

[geremy condra]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 6:05 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>>> I would be +0 on making **kwargs an ordered dict automatically, and -1 on
>>>> adding ***ordered_kwargs. Because kwargs is mostly used only for argument
>>>> passing, and generally with only a small number of items, it probably
>>>> doesn't matter too much if it's slightly slower than an unordered dict.
>>>
>>> Yeah, simply making the kwargs dict always ordered is likely the way
>>> we would do it. That's also the only solution with any chance of
>>> working by default with the way most decorators are structured
>>> (accepting *args and **kwargs and passing them to the wrapped
>>> function).
>>
>> -1.
>>
>> How often do you really need this ?
>>
>> In which of those cases wouldn't a static code analysis give you
>> the call order of the parameters already  ?
>>
>> "Nice to have" is not good enough to warrant a slow down of
>> all function calls involving keyword arguments, adding overhead
>> for other Python implementations and possibly causing problems
>> with 3rd party extensions relying on getting a PyDict for the
>> keyword arguments object.
>
> What he says.
>
> In addition, I wonder what the semantics would be if the caller passed
> **d where d was an *unordered* dict...

Wouldn't this be a good argument for the original proposal? That there
wouldn't be confusion about whether you were getting an odict or a
dict with ***?

Also, would functions that didn't specify this behavior see an actual
performance hit? I assumed that given the existence of METH_NOARGS and
friends that there was some kind of optimization going on here, but I
can't get it to turn up on timeit.

Geremy Condra