[Python-Dev] Repeatability of looping over dicts (original) (raw)

Fred Drake fdrake at acm.org
Sat Jan 5 00:02:40 CET 2008

On Jan 4, 2008, at 5:54 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

What code would break if we loosened this restriction? I guess defining d.items() as zip(d.keys(), d.values()) would no longer fly, but does anyone actually depend on this?

I don't know what code would break today; this was initially added to
the set of promises made by the dict methods a decode ago, but it was
in response to a need in the software I was working on at the time
(possibly Grail, for which 2.6/3.0 isn't an issue).

That question should probably be addressed to a fairly wide audience
(comp.lang.python) since the promise has been there for so long.

-Fred

-- Fred Drake

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list