[Python-Dev] dict(keys, values) (original) (raw)

Brian Quinlan brian at sweetapp.com
Thu Feb 1 10:36:53 CET 2007


George Sakkis wrote:

Perhaps this has been brought up in the past but I couldn't find it in the archives: far too often I use the idiom dict(zip(keys,values)), or the same with izip. How does letting dict take two positional arguments sound ?

Pros: - Pretty obvious semantics, no mental overhead to learn and remember it. - More concise (especially if one imports itertools just to use izip). - At least as efficient as the current alternatives. - Backwards compatible. Cons:

Also note that the keyword variant is longer than the zip variant e.g.

dict(zip(keys, values)) dict(keys=keys, values=values)

and the relationship between the keys and values seems far less obvious to me in the keyword variant.

Cheers, Brian



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