Two variable dictionary comprehension

[Deborah Swanson]

Thanks Steve for writing this, and I'll read it more carefully when my
illness gives my mind back to me.

I was actually a math major before I discovered computer science, and I
had to progress beyond machine language and assembler before I found the
subtle differences and more flexible boundaries of higher level
programming languages you talk about. I'm sure much of it's the same
with Python. They key I think will be in finding more of the logic in
Python, and then fleshing it out with more detail and choices. The core
logic wasn't taught to me in the courses I took, so I need to backfill
it now.

I look forward to studying what you've written here as soon as I can.

Deborah


Steve D'Aprano wrote, on Monday, April 03, 2017 6:05 PM
> 
> On Tue, 4 Apr 2017 03:27 am, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> 
> > I'll admit that both dictionaries and comprehensions are still a 
> > little bit fuzzy to me, especially when I get away from the common 
> > usages. This could be a good exercise to clarify some of the fuzzy 
> > areas.
> 
> 
> As far as comprehensions go, how is your mathematics?
> 
> If you remember your set builder notation from maths, list 
> comprehensions are based on that.
> 
> In maths, we say something like:
> 
> {2n + 1 : 0 ≤ n ≤ 9}
> 
> which might be read aloud as "the set of 2 times n, plus 1, 
> such that n is between 0 and 9 inclusive".
> 
> http://www.mathwords.com/s/set_builder_notation.htm
> 
> A similar notation might be:
> 
> {2n + 1 : n ∈ {1, 2, 3}}
> 
> said as "the set of 2 times n, plus 1, such that n is an 
> element of the set {1, 2, 3}".
> 
> 
> If you're a maths geek like me, this is second nature :-)
> 
> 
> Now, Python's list comprehension syntax is based on a similar 
> notation, except we spell it out in words rather than 
> symbols, using the familiar "for n in ..." syntax from 
> for-loops instead of : "such that".
> 
> {2*n + 1 for n in range(10)}
> 
> {2*n + 1 for n in (1, 2, 3)}
> 
> 
> A few other differences:
> 
> - list comprehensions use [ ] for the outermost brackets;
> - set and dict comprehensions use { };
> - generator expressions use ( ) (unless the parentheses can 
> be implied).
> 
> We're not restricted to mathematical expressions, and can use 
> any Python expression we like:
> 
> [value.method(arg)[1] for (value, arg) in zip(values, arguments)]
> 
> 
> translates roughly into this for-loop:
> 
> result = []
> for (value, arg) in zip(values, arguments):
>     result.append(value.method(arg)[1])
> 
> 
> 
> Another difference is that comprehensions allow an "if" clause:
> 
> [v.method(a)[1] for (v, a) in zip(values, arguments) if v is not None]
> 
> translates something like:
> 
> 
> result = []
> for (v, a) in zip(values, arguments):
>     if v is not None:
>         result.append(v.method(a)[1])
> 
> 
> There's more, but that covers probably 98% of comprehension usage.
> 
> And of course, remember that dict comprehensions use the same 
> key:value syntax as ordinary dict "literals" (the official 
> name is "dict display").
> 
> result = {}
> for key, value in zip(keys, values):
>     result[key] = value
> 
> 
> becomes
> 
> result = {key:value for (key, value) in zip(keys, values)}
> 
> although frankly that's better written as:
> 
> dict(zip(keys, values))
> 
> 
> 
> Hope this helps!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Steve
> “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered 
> up, and sure enough, things got worse.
> 
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>