On Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 08:01:38PM -0500, James Lu wrote:
> 
> > On Mar 4, 2019, at 11:25 AM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:

> > Another example would be when reading command line options, where the 
> > most common convention is for "last option seen" to win:
> > 
> > [steve@ando Lib]$ grep --color=always --color=never "zero" f*.py
[...]
> Indeed, in this case you would want to use {**, **} syntax. 

No I would NOT want to use the {**, **} syntax, because it is ugly. 
That's why people ask for + instead. (Or perhaps I should say "as well 
as" since the double-star syntax is not going away.)


[...]
> > Unless someone can demonstrate that the design of dict.update() was a 
> > mistake
>
> You’re making a logical mistake here. + isn’t supposed to have 
> .update’s behavior and it never was supposed to.

James, I'm the author of the PEP, and for the purposes of the proposal, 
the + operator is supposed to do what I say it is supposed to do.

You might be able to persuade me to change the PEP, if you have a 
sufficiently good argument, or you can write your own counter PEP making 
a different choice, but please don't tell me what I intended. I know 
what I intended, and it is for + to have the same last-key-wins 
behaviour as update. That's the behaviour which is most commonly 
requested in the various times this comes up.


> > , and the "require unique keys" behaviour is more common,
>
> I just have.

No you haven't -- you have simply *declared* that it is more common, 
without giving any evidence for it.


> 99% of the time you want to have keys from one dict override another, 
> you’d be better off doing it in-place and so would be using .update() 
> anyways.

I don't know if it is "99% of the time" or 50% of the time or 5%, 
but this PEP is for the remaining times where we don't want in-place 
updates but we want a new dict.

I use list.append or list.extend more often than list concatenation, but 
when I want a new list, list concatenation is very useful. This proposal 
is about those cases where we want a new dict.


-- 
Steven
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