[Python-Dev] ValuesView abc: why doesn't it (officially) inherit from Iterable? (original) (raw)

Alan Franzoni mailing at franzoni.eu
Tue Jun 14 16:47:24 EDT 2016

ValuesView doesn't inherit from Set because the values in a dictionary can contain duplicates. That makes sense. It's just the missing Iterable, which is a weaker contract, that doesn't.

I'm filing the bug tomorrow.

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jun 2016 at 13:30 Alan Franzoni <mailing at franzoni.eu> wrote:

Hello, I hope not to bother anyone with a somewhat trivial question, I was unable to get an answer from other channels. I was just checking out some docs on ABCs for a project of mine, where I need to do some type-related work. Those are the official docs about the ValuesView type, in both Python 2 and 3: https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.ValuesView https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html and this is the source (Python 2, but same happens in Python 3)

https://hg.python.org/releases/2.7.11/file/9213c70c67d2/Lib/abcoll.py#l479 I was very puzzled about the ValuesView interface, because from a logical standpoint it should inherit from Iterable, IMHO (it's even got the iter Mixin method); on the contrary the docs say that it just inherits from MappingView, which inherits from Sized, which doesn't inherit from Iterable. So I fired up my 2.7 interpreter: >>> from collections import Iterable >>> d = {1:2, 3:4} >>> isinstance(d.viewvalues(), Iterable) True >>> It looks iterable, after all, because of Iterable's own subclasshook. But I don't understand why ValuesView isn't explicitly Iterable. Other ABCs, like Sequence, are explicitly inheriting Iterable. Is there some arcane reason behind that, or it's just a documentation+implementation shortcoming (with no real-world impact) for a little-used feature? To add some extra info, both KeysView and ItemsView inherit from Set which does inherit from Iterable. I personally don't know why ValuesView doesn't inherit from Set (although Iterable does override subclasshook() so there isn't a direct functional loss which if this turns out to be a bug why no one has notified until now). Alan, would you mind filing an issue at bugs.python.org about this?

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