How can I make a dictionary that marks itself when it's modified?

[Christian Tismer]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Christian Tismer wrote:
>> Just to add a word that I forgot:
>>
>> Adhering to the subject line, the intent is to track modifications
>> of a dict.
>> By definition, modification of a member of a dict without replacing
>> the value is not considered a dict change.
>>
> Well, I agree. But I suppose much depends on exactly what the OP meant 
> by "... add a new element or alter an existing one". The post did follow 
> that with "(the values in the dict are mutable)", which is presumably 
> why garabik-2500 proposed catching __getitem__ as well as __setitem__.

Yes, I understood this after reading more. Probably easier to
solve if the problem is spelled more specifically.

> I merely wanted to point out (not to you!) that there was no effective 
> way to capture a change to a mutable item without, as you say, modifying 
> the element classes.

You are completely right. This is asking for too much, unless one is
prepared to heavily modify the interpreter for debugging purposes,
which actually might be a way to solve the specific problem, once.

cheers - chris

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