[Python-Dev] Dict access with double-dot (syntactic sugar) (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian.curtin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 24 15:16:38 CET 2011

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 06:40, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

"class attrdict" is a perennial dead-end for intermediate pythonistas who want to save 3 characters/5 keystrokes for item access. Other languages such as javascript allow "somedict.foo" to mean the same as "somedict['foo']", so why not python? Well, there are a number of reasons why not, beginning with all the magic method names in python.

But saving keystrokes is still a reasonable goal.

Code is read far more often than it is written, so readability tends to count more than most other metrics.

So what about a compromise? Allow "somedict..foo", with two dots, to take

that place. It still saves 2 characters (often 4 keystrokes; and I find even ', "[", or "]" harder to type than ".").

I don't see the benefit, but maybe it'll save a few bytes in file size. Anyone reviewing your code now has to think "does this need one or two dots?"

Anyways, why not just do something like this:

class AttrDict(dict): def getattr(self, attr): return super(AttrDict, self).getitem(attr)

d = AttrDict() d["a"] = 1 d.a 1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20110324/56f044d7/attachment.html>

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