a clean way to define dictionary

[Alexander Schmolck]

mis6 at pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) writes:

> Sorry for the typo, of course I meant __setitem__/__getitem__. 
> I am saying that a workaround for the change of the constructor signature 
> is to subclass dict and to override the constructor. There is 
> not a big penalty and you seems to agree (your last sentence). 
> Overriding __getitem__ gives a big penalty, that's true, but this has 
> nothing to do with the change of the constructor in Python 2.3, right ?
> I do not understand where the source of the confusion is (if any).
 
OK, I see now what you mean. I don't agree the penalty for overriding
__getitem__ "has nothing to dow ith change of the constructor" in the context
of deciding whether it would be more desirable to 'enhance' dicts with a new
'default' option or the syntactic sugar behavior. The syntacitic sugar can
trivially be supplied by the user (``makeDict(**d): return d``), at no
significant performance cost -- the 'default' behavior can't (and isn't just
MTOWTDI).

'as