[Python-Dev] collections module (original) (raw)

Christian Tanzer tanzer at swing.co.at
Fri Jan 9 12:12:56 EST 2004

"Raymond Hettinger" <python at rcn.com> wrote:

I would like to establish a new module for some collection classes.

I'd prefer a package. The number of collection classes is bound to increase over time and a module with too many classes sucks (been there, done that :-)

Guido wanted this to be discussed by a number of people. While a rich set of collection classes have proven their worth in other contexts, it could be that more is not better for python. One the language's elegances is the ability to do just about anything with just lists and dicts. If you have too many mutable containers to choose from, the choice of which to use becomes less obvious.

I used Python for more than five years before I really needed something else than lists and dicts (that includes using lists for stacks and queues).

But quite recently I had to implement a doubly-linked list. Using that made the code in question substantially easier.

I'd like to see things like a queue in the standard library. Maybe even a stack would be nice (maybe I've just seen too many attempts pushing/popping at the front of a list -:)

-- Christian Tanzer http://www.c-tanzer.at/

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