[Python-Dev] Guarantee ordered dict literals in v3.7?

[Chris Barker]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 7:41 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>
wrote:

> > With arbitrary order, it made sense to sort, so as to always give the
> same
> > "pretty" representation. But now that order is "part of" the dict itself,
> > it seems prettyprint should present the preserved order of the dict.
>
> I disagree. Many uses of dicts are still conceptually unordered, even if
> the dict now preserves insertion order. For those use-cases, insertion
> order is of no interest whatsoever, and sorting is still "prettier".
>

and many uses of dicts have "sorted" order as completely irrelevant, and
sorting them arbitrarily is not necessarily pretty (you can't provide a
sort key can you? -- so yes, it's arbitrary)

I'm not necessarily saying we should break things, but I won't agree that
pprint sorting dicts is the "right" interface for what is actually an
order-preserving mapping.

I would think it was only the right choice in the first place in order (get
it?) to get a consistent representation, not because sorting was a good
thing per se.

-Chris

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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