> Hm, as far as I know shadowing the builtins is discouraged. *accidentally* shadowing builtins is a common Python gotcha - that's why it's comon here to raise *warnings* about this.
Explicitly and knowingly rebinding a builtin (or any other name FWIW) *with a compatible object* is something else. Just google for "monkey-patching". And yes, it *is* an application of duck-typing. >In either case, I would guess that for the vast majority of cases the > builtin dicts are just fine That's probably why there are so many uses of dict-like objects (starting with the __dict__ attribute of classes, which is usually a DictProxy object) and so many helpers to build dict-like objects. > and there's no compelling reason for dict(**kwds). Yes there is : this *is* the ordinary Python syntax - calling a type to get an instance of it. The dict-litteral syntax is mostly syntactic sugar. > Perhaps it's something that should be reconsidered for Py3K Hopefully not. The fact that you fail to understand why a given feature exists and how it can be useful is not a reason to ask for arbitrary restrictions on the language. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
