Pre-PEP: Dictionary accumulator methods

[Jack Diederich]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 02:20:33PM -0700, Steven Bethard wrote:
> Michele Simionato wrote:
> >I am surprised nobody suggested we put those two methods into a
> >separate module (say dictutils or even UserDict) as functions:
> >
> >from dictutils import tally, listappend
> >
> >tally(mydict, key)
> >listappend(mydict, key, value)
> 
> Sorry to join the discussion so late (I've been away from my email for a 
> week) but this was exactly my reaction too.  In fact, I have a 
> 'dicttools' module with similar methods in it:
<snipped>

I like this approach, it will give us a chance to test & tweak the signature
before hanging it off dict proper.  It feels similar to the strings module 
to str transition, sets module to set builtin, and itertools module to iter
transition.

itertools to iter transition, huh?  I slipped that one in, I mentioned it
to Raymond at PyCon and he didn't flinch.  It would be nice not to have to
sprinkle 'import itertools as it' in code.  iter could also become a type
wrapper instead of a function, so an iter instance could be a wrapper that
figures out whether to call .next or __getitem__ depending on it's argument.
for item in iter(mylist).imap:
  print item
or
for item in iter.imap(mylist):
  print item

I haven't digested that too much, just a thought.

-jackdied