Dictionary from list?

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 01:14:46 GMT, Jim Correia <jim.correia at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Hopefully you and everyone who reads your code has all
>> the little details in the camel book memorized.
>
>I was just asking if there was a built in coercion available.  
>(Coercions aren't unheard of in scripting languages.)  This wasn't a my 
>language is better than your language war.  I don't have particularly 
>strong feelings about perl or python one way or the other (I do most of 
>my work in compiled languages - C mostly) but use the right tool, or 
>sometimes the convenient tool, for the job.

Sorry if I came across as a jerk.  I read more into your post than you
intended.

Dynamic languages generally can't convert at assignment because there are no
declarations to tell them what to convert to (perl's @$% are effectively type
declarations).  Python's '=' has a different philosophy than a C++-ish
operator= anyway.

The only way to coerce things is to explicitly call the coerce() function on
them.  Python's built-in operators do this for numeric types, but that's about
it.  You can also give objects a __coerce__ method.  But it really doesn't do
the sort of thing I think you mean when you say "coerce".

I think a list->dict converter would be a perfectly reasonable addition to the
library, but it's not there to my knowledge.

There is a built-in function in mxTools, but it expects a list of tuples and
it's not the the stdlib anyway.