[Python-ideas] Unpacking a dict

[Ethan Furman]

On 05/26/2016 10:40 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 06:50:12PM +0200, Sven R. Kunze wrote:

>> So far, all proposals which deviate from Michael's one are ju
>>
>> 'a': s1, 'b': s2, 'c': s3 = mapping   # no braces :)
 >>
>> That looks quite good to me. What do you think?
>
> I think that if you submitted code to me with keys 'a', 'b', 'c' and
> variables s1, s2, s3, I'd probably reject it and tell you to use
> descriptive, meaningful keys and names.
>
> I wish people would stop giving toy examples as examples of how nice the
> syntax looks, and instead try to use it with descriptive names taken
> from real code. I believe that, by far the majority of the time, you
> will be repeating the same names twice, and likely exceeding most
> reasonable line lengths:
>
> 'referer': referer, 'useragent': useragent, 'use_proxy': use_proxy, 'follow_links': follow_links, 'clobber': clobber, 'timeout': timeout = mapping
>
> Still think it looks quite good? If you do, that's your right, of
> course, it's a matter of personal taste. But using toy examples with one
> or two letter variable names is not a fair or realistic test of what it
> will be like to use this syntax in real code.

With the simple syntax that I could live with, a real example could be:

   {active_id, active_ids, active_model} = context

or

   {partner_id, product_id, ship_to, product_ids} = values

which is more readable than

   (partner_id, product_id, ship_to, product_ids =
       (values[k] for k in
           ['partner_id', 'product_id', 'ship_to', 'product_ids']))

Wow.  That's a lot of room for typos and wrong order.

--
~Ethan~