On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:36:32 -0800, Raymond Hettinger wrote: > [Nick Coghlan] >> The examples in the PEP used 'odict' (until recently), but the patch >> was for OrderedDict. > > As an experiment, try walking down the hall asking a few programmers who > aren't in this conversion what they think collections.odict() is? > Is it a class or function? What does it do? Can the English as second > language folks guess what the o stands for? Is it a builtin or pure > python? My guess is that the experiment will be informative.
Just today, I was talking with a colleague (which is learning Python right now) about "ordered dict". His first thought was a dictionary that, when iterated, would return keys in sorted order. I beleive he was partly misguided by his knowledge of C++. C++ has always had std::map which returns sorted data upon iteration (it's a binary tree); they're now adding std::unordered_map (and std::unordered_set), to be implemented with a hash table. So, if you come from C++, it's easy to mistake the meaning of an ordered dict. This said, I don't have a specific suggestion, but I would stay with lowercase-only for simmetry with defaultdict. -- Giovanni Bajo Develer S.r.l. http://www.develer.com _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
