[Python-Dev] tally (and other accumulators) (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleaxit at gmail.com
Tue Apr 4 17:17:57 CEST 2006

On Apr 4, 2006, at 8:01 AM, Jeremy Hylton wrote:

On 4/4/06, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com> wrote:

import collections def tally(seq): d = collections.defaultdict(int) for item in seq: d[item] += 1 return dict(d) ... Putting it somewhere in collections seems like a great idea. defaultdict is a bit odd, because the functionality doesn't have anything to do with defaults, just dicts. maybe a classmethod on regular dicts would make more sense?

Good points: it should probably be a classmethod on dict, or a
function in module collections.

I write this function regularly, so I'd be happy to have it available directly.

Heh, same here -- soon as I saw it proposed on c.l.py I recognized an
old friend and it struck me that, simple but widely used, it should
be somewhere in the standard library.

Alex

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