curly-brace-aphobic?

[D-Man]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 08:35:42AM -0600, Grant Griffin wrote:
| C.Laurence Gonsalves wrote:
| > 
| ...
| > I'm not sure why you need to be reminded whether something is a sequence
| > or a dictionary.
| 
| I guess it's because sequences and dictionaries are conceptually very
| different.  (You can tell, because we have a special word just to

I'm not sure how different they are conceptually.  A dictionary is a
collection (sequence) of data that is indexed by arbitrary keys.  A
list is a collection (sequence) of data that is indexed by integers
only.  It seems to me that a list is a special case of a dictionary.
How about classes that implement __getitem__?  They perform the same
operation, just according to their own rules.  If the class is written
to follow the same rules a dictionary or a list follows, but do some
extra magic on the side, it could be used in place of the
dictionary/list without any modification to the client code.

I think that the same syntax is used because they are the same
operation, just slightly different restrictions/rules.

Just my own $0.02.
-D