Ka-Ping Yee writes:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 4:01 PM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > But adding dictionaries is fundamentally *useful*. It is expressive.
>
> It is useful. It's just that + is the wrong name.
First, let me say that I prefer ?!'s position here, so my bias is made
apparent. I'm also aware that I have biases so I'm sympathetic to
those who take a different position.
Rather than say it's "wrong", let me instead point out that I think
it's pragmatically troublesome to use "+". I can think of at least
four interpretations of "d1 + d2"
1. update
2. multiset (~= Collections.Counter addition)
3. addition of functions into the same vector space (actually, a
semigroup will do ;-), and this is the implementation of
Collections.Counter
4. "fiberwise" set addition (ie, of functions into relations)
and I'm very jet-lagged so I may be missing some.
There's also the fact that the operations denoted by "|" and "||" are
often implemented as "short-circuiting", and therefore not
commutative, while "+" usually is (and that's reinforced for
mathematicians who are trained to think of "+" as the operator for
Abelian groups, while "*" is a (possibly) non-commutative operator. I
know commutativity of "+" has been mentioned before, but the
non-commutativity of "|" -- and so unsuitability for many kinds of
dict combination -- hasn't been emphasized before IIRC.
Since "|" (especially "|=") *is* suitable for "update", I think we
should reserve "+" for some future commutative extension.
In the spirit of full disclosure:
Of these, 2 is already implemented and widely used, so we don't need
to use dict.__add__ for that. I've never seen 4 in the mathematical
literature (union of relations is not the same thing). 3, however, is
very common both for mappings with small domain and sparse
representation of mappings with a default value (possibly computed
then cached), and "|" is not suitable for expressing that sort of
addition (I'm willing to say it's "wrong" :-).
Steve
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