PEP218: Representing the empty set

[Paul Rubin]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:
> Maybe it's nothing more than this distinction:  dict() is a call which
> *returns* an empty dictionary.  {} *is* an empty dictionary.

I don't understand in what ways these are really distinct.

    a = []
    for i in range(2):
      a.append({})
    print (a[0] is a[1])

prints 0, if that helps.  Clearly "a = {}" and "a = dict()" both run
some code that creates a new empty dictionary.  It's not the case that
"a = {}" sets a to an empty dict created at compile time or anything
like that.