a = b = 1 just syntactic sugar?

[Ed Avis]

mis6 at pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) writes:

>>A couple more anomalous cases could be cleaned up by adding dict.set
>>as a counterpart of dict.setdefault
>
>Am I mistaken or you want dict.__setitem__ ?

Yes, but ideally without the four underscores which seem to convey
'internal stuff, you're not really meant to call this'.  Perhaps I am
just too squeamish and good Python programmers have no objection to
writing code full of __x__().  I know I've seen some code by Guido
which looks like that.

I would however fix the documentation at
<http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/typesmapping.html> so that it
mentions __setitem__ and and other built-in methods.  At the moment it
lists a[k] = v, which AFAIK is syntactic sugar for the expression
a.__setitem__(k, v), but it does not list the __setitem__ method
itself.

-- 
Ed Avis <ed at membled.com>