Why are there no ordered dictionaries?

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Bengt Richter wrote:
 > I think the concept has converged to a replace-or-append-by-key ordering
 > of key:value items with methods approximately like a dict. We're now
 > into usability aspects such as syntactic sugar vs essential primitives,
 > and default behaviour vs selectable modes, ISTM.

Yes, and we would be good if we do not stop the discussion at this point 
with nothing, but really create such a sophisticated implementation. 
Whether it will become popular or go to the standard lib some day is a 
completely different question.

 > E.g., it might be nice to have a mode that assumes d[key] is 
d.items()[k][1] when
 > key is an integer, and otherwise uses dict lookup, for cases where 
the use
 > case is just string dict keys.

I also thought about that and I think PHP has that feature, but it's 
probably better to withstand the temptation to do that. It could lead to 
an awful confusion if the keys are integers.

-- Christoph