[Python-ideas] Fwd: Dict access with double-dot (syntactic sugar)

[Westley Martínez]

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 06:23 -0600, Jameson Quinn wrote:
> "class attrdict" is a perennial dead-end for intermediate pythonistas
> who want to save 3 characters/5 keystrokes for item access. Other
> languages such as javascript allow "somedict.foo" to mean the same as
> "somedict['foo']", they think, so why not python? Well, there are a
> number of reasons why not, beginning with the possible conflicts with
> keywords or any of the magic method names in python.
> 
> 
> But saving keystrokes is still a reasonable goal.
> 
> 
> So what about a compromise? Allow "somedict..foo", with two dots, to
> take that place. It still saves 2 relatively-hard-to-type characters.
> 
> 
> The "foo" part would of course have to obey attribute/identifier
> naming rules. So there would be no shortcut for "somedict['$#!%']".
> But for any identifier-legal foo, the interpreter would just
> read ..foo as ['foo'].
> 
> 
> I would not be surprised if I'm not the first person to suggest this.
> If so, and there's already well-known reasons why this is a bad idea,
> I apologize. But if the only reason not to is "we never did it that
> way before" or "it would be too addictive, and so people would never
> want to use older python versions" or "headache for tools like
> pylint", I think we should do it.
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For one, it looks far too similar to object.attr.