Preferred Python idiom for handling non-existing dictionary keys and why?

[Gerrit Holl]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     >> Say I am populating a dictionary with a list and appending. I have
>     >> written it thusly:
> 
>     John> You want the dict.setdefault method.
> 
> d.setdefault() never made any sense to me (IOW, to use it I always had to
> look it up).

I have had a wrong idea about setdefault for a very long time. To me, it
sounds like: "set this value the default value of dict, so after this
call, let each non-existing key result in this value".

Gerrit.

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