[Python-Dev] Proposal: defaultdict (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sun Feb 19 00:34:59 CET 2006

At 01:44 PM 02/18/2006 -0500, James Y Knight wrote:

On Feb 18, 2006, at 2:33 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote: > I don't understand. In the rationale of PEP 333, it says > "The rationale for requiring a dictionary is to maximize portability > between servers. The alternative would be to define some subset of a > dictionary's methods as being the standard and portable interface." > > That rationale is not endangered: if the environment continues to > be a dict exactly, servers continue to be guaranteed what precise > set of operations is available on the environment.

Yes it is endangered.

So we'll update the spec to say you can't use a dict that has the default set. It's not reasonable to expect that language changes might not require updates to a PEP. Certainly, we don't have to worry about being backward compatible when it's only Python 2.5 that's affected by the change. :)

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list