[Python-Dev] defaultdict proposal round three (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Feb 22 08:47:40 CET 2006

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

Like "autodict" could mean anything.

Everything is meaningless until you know something about it. If you'd never seen Python before, would you know what 'dict' meant?

If I were seeing "defaultdict" for the first time, I would need to look up the docs before I was confident I knew exactly what it did -- as I've mentioned before, my initial guess would have been wrong. The same procedure would lead me to an understanding of 'autodict' just as quickly.

Maybe 'autodict' isn't the best term either -- I'm open to suggestions. But my instincts still tell me that 'defaultdict' is the best term for something else that we might want to add one day as well, so I'm just trying to make sure we don't squander it lightly.

-- Greg

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