Behaviour of pop() for dictionaries

[BlindAnagram]

On 14/06/2021 08:29, Greg Ewing wrote:
> On 14/06/21 4:19 am, BlindAnagram wrote:
>> Am I missing the obvious way to obtain the value (or the key) from a 
>> dictionary that is known to hold only one item?
> 
> v = d.popitem()[1]

Thanks, Greg, I missed that.
> 
>> More importantly, is there a good reason why we don't have d.pop() for 
>> dictionaries?
> 
> My guess is because it's not generally useful to get an returns the value arbitrary
> value from a dict without its corresponding key. Hence the existence
> of popitem().

However, d.pop(key, [default]) returns the value (or the default) and 
consistency with other pops (a good thing in my view) would suggest that 
d.pop() could return a random value, which would serve my purpose when 
there is only one element.