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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Mar 24 18:50:51 CET 2011

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:37 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> wrote:

OK, fair enough. People don't like this. So let me back up a step.

Clearly this is intended for using with things that you get as a dictionary, but which really should be namespaces. The top two cases of that are parsed json objects and **kw arguments.

If you need this for **kw arguments maybe you're not using them right; why not name your arguments if you're going to reference them by name?

The JSON use case seems to be driven because this is the way JavaScript does things -- they don't distinguish between dicts and objects. I personally think that's a poor language feature: it blurs a line that should be clear, between data (dict keys) and program variables (attributes).

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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