[Python-Dev] bug or a feature?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:19 PM, Frank Wierzbicki <fwierzbicki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 5:50 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Greg Ewing wrote:
>> Implementations are also permitted to restrict namespace dictionaries to
>> only accept string keys (I believe Jython does this for performance reasons
>> - CPython just optimised the hell out of normal dictionaries that happen to
>> only contain string keys instead).
> Jython's current version (2.2) and back did indeed restrict these
> dictionaries to accept string keys only, but future versions will
> allow non-string keys (the trunk version already does).  Many
> frameworks use non-string keys in these dictionaries.

I think that's laudable from a compatibility POV, but at the same time
I think frameworks should rethink such usage and switch to strings
containing non-identifier characters, e.g. '$' or '.' or some such
convention.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)