[Python-ideas] What would you call such an object (was: ordered dict) (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Thu Apr 26 18:22:27 CEST 2007

"LD 'Gus' Landis" <ldlandis at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am wondering if in y'alls opinion the following is "just a dictionary" or is it a different kind of object that has some of the characteristics of a dictionary, and has order. If y'all think that it is "just a dictionary", then how does one override the notion of a "hash" for the key in a dictionary and make it some other ordered structure (e.g. a B-Tree, AVL, etc). (Please no flame toss to some other list -- this is a "use" of an ordered "ordered dict")

This is easily implemented as a variant of a treap, in which rather than choosing a new sub-node based on different characters in a string, you choose a new sub-node based on different values in a tuple. There is one small problem with the structure as you have described it; in order to be able to choose a (sorted) ordering on the portion of a key as you show here...

key = object.order(key) -> 3 key = object.order(key) -> "abc"

...it won't make any sense in future Pythons. 3 < "abc" will return an exception.

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