On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 05:23:33 pm Glenn Linderman wrote: > The problem with the ordereddict/OrderedDict/odict is that there > are way too many possible orderings, and without being more > specific (InsertionSequenceOrderPreservingDictionary) people are > doing to think "sort" when they hear "ordered".
For what it's worth, the first time I heard the term "ordered dictionary", I assumed it would be a dict where the keys are kept in sorted order. But so what? Making things easy is an admirable goal, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Python is a programming language, not a door handle. There's no requirement that every last feature is easy to intuit for a naive user. It's okay if people sometimes guess wrong, so long as they have opportunity to learn better. Speaking as an ignorant and lazy programmer, being user-friendly is one thing, but molly-coddling the ignorant and lazy is another. Especially when it takes just a few seconds to type "import collections; help(collections.odict)" and learn that the O stands for ordered, and that the order is specifically order of insertion rather than lexicographic order. Having good help text is user-friendly. Naming the class InsertionSequenceOrderPreservingDictionary is just dumbing down at the cost of usability. I trust this wasn't a serious suggestion, but just in case it was, I'll point out that we have dict instead of UnorderedKeyValueMapping. Does anyone think that people find Python harder to learn because of that choice? > I think FIFOdict is a reasonable abbreviation for > InsertionSequenceOrderPreservingDictionary :) I see your smiley, but in my opinion, the sort of programmer who can't work out what an OrderedDict (or odict) is, given the name, the doc string and the Internet, is going to have even more trouble working out what FIFOdict means. I have no strong feelings either way between odict and OrderedDict. PEP 8 seems to demand OrderedDict, but I actually prefer odict on the basis that an ordered dictionary feels like a fundamental data structure like str, list and dict rather than a specialist class like HTTPBasicAuthHandler. (I realise that "fundamental data structure" is not a well-defined category.) I look forward to the day OrderedDict becomes a built-in so it can be renamed odict :) -- Steven _______________________________________________ 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
