Dictionary self lookup

Norberto Lopes shelika.void at gmail.com
Wed Jun 24 07:21:35 EDT 2009


On Jun 24, 1:21 pm, "Diez B. Roggisch" <de... at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> Norberto Lopes wrote:
> > On Jun 24, 11:59 am, "Diez B. Roggisch" <de... at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> >> Norberto Lopes wrote:
> >> > Hi all.
> >> > Assuming that python dictionaries already provide a bit of "shoot
> >> > yourself in the foot", I think what I have in mind would not be so
> >> > bad.
>
> >> What kind of foot-shooting do you have in mind?
>
> > a = { "foo" : { "bar" : "moo" }}
> > a["bar"] = a["foo"]
> > print a
> > {'foo': {'bar': 'moo'}, 'bar': {'bar': 'moo'}}
> > a["foo"]["bar"] = a["foo"]
> > print a
> > {'foo': {'bar': {...}}, 'bar': {'bar': {...}}}
>
> > (I know it's not a C shoot in the foot or something but still...)
>
> And something working alike for lists and objects. Cyclic references are a
> fact of (programming)-life unless you go fully functional - and then you'd
> certainly miss it sometimes..
>
Yes. (and sometimes you miss functional :D)

> > config = {"home" : "/home/test"}
> > config["user1"] = config["home"] + "/user1"
> > config["user2"] = config["home"] + "/user2"
> > config["python-dev"] = config["user1"] + "/py-dev"
>
> > Now, if you change config["home"] you'd have to redo all of the other
> > entries. With the first one (assuming pointers to the entries)
> > everything would get updated. Although python does not handles dict
> > keys/values this way. Now that I think of this there would be a lot
> > more than just syntactic sugar for this.
>
> Things that are re-done usually are useful being put into a function. Then
> redoing becomes easier :)
>
> Diez

True.
In any case, reading from your pov, it seems that the solution would
cause more problems than solving one.

Thanks for the feedback though.
Much appreciated :)



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