Unfortunate exception on dict item assignment (and why aren't slices hashable?)

[Ben Finney]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 20:48:16 -0500, Jeff Epler wrote:
>>>> {}[:] = None
> 
> I'd have expected something like 'TypeError: unslicable type' meaning
> that you can't slice a dict, not that slice()s aren't hashable.

You're not requesting to slice a dict; you're requesting to reference an
element of a dict with : as the key.

> In fact, I wonder why slices *aren't* hashable.

How would you store the resulting key; how would you expect it to be
returned from keys() ?

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