Why are there no ordered dictionaries?

[Tom Anderson]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Christoph Zwerschke wrote:

> Tom Anderson wrote:
>
>> True, but that's not exactly rocket science. I think the rules governing 
>> when your [] acts like a dict [] and when it acts like a list [] are vastly 
>> more complex than the name of one attribute.
>
> I think it's not really rocket science either to assume that an ordered 
> dictionary behaves like a dictionary if you access items by subscription 
> and like a list if you use slices (since slice indexes must evaluate to 
> integers anyway, they can only be used as indexes, not as keys).

When you put it that way, it makes a certain amount of sense - [:] is 
always about index, and [] is always about key. It's still icky, but it is 
completely unambiguous.

tom

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