[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > This has been bothering me for a while. Just want to find out if it > just me or perhaps others have thought of this too: Why shouldn't the > keyset of a dictionary be represented as a set instead of a list?
I think the order of the items returned by keys() and values() are related. I decided on a short empirical test: >>> import random >>> n=50 >>> d = dict((i,random.randint(0,n-1)) for i in range(n)) >>> k,v = d.keys(), d.values() >>> [d[k[i]] == v[i] for i in range(n)] [True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True] >>> ## for larger n try >>> # False in [d[k[i]] == v[i] for i in range(n)] The order of keys() and the order of values() are related, so a change to returning sets would also loose this functionality. Mind you, Never rely on that implied ordering. Always use items(). And so *if* sets were returned for keys() and values() then it should for items() too. - Paddy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
