Pre-PEP: Dictionary accumulator methods

Reinhold Birkenfeld reinhold-birkenfeld-nospam at wolke7.net
Sun Mar 20 05:27:45 EST 2005


George Sakkis wrote:
>> -1 form me.
>>
>> I'm not very glad with both of them ( not a naming issue ) because i
>> think that the dict type should offer only methods that apply to each
>> dict whatever it contains. count() specializes to dict values that are
>> addable and appendlist to those that are extendable. Why not
>> subtractable, dividable or right-shiftable? Because of majority
>> approval? I'm mot a speed fetishist and destroying the clarity of a
>> very fundamental data structure for speedup rather arbitrary
>> accumulations seems to be a bad idea. I would move this stuff in a
>> subclass.
>>
>> Regards Kay
> 
> +1 on this. The new suggested operations are meaningful for a subset of all valid dicts, so they
> should not be part of the base dict API. If any version of this is approved, it will clearly be an
> application of the "practicality beats purity" zen rule, and the justification for applying it in
> this case instead of subclassing should better be pretty strong; so far I'm not convinced though.

So, would the `setdefaultvalue' approach be more consistent in your eyes?

Reinhold



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