How can I make a dictionary that marks itself when it's modified?

[Christian Tismer]

Steve Holden wrote:
> garabik-news-2005-05 at kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk wrote:
>> sandravandale at yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>>> It's important that I can read the contents of the dict without
>>> flagging it as modified, but I want it to set the flag the moment I add
>>> a new element or alter an existing one (the values in the dict are
>>> mutable), this is what makes it difficult. Because the values are
>>> mutable I don't think you can tell the difference between a read and a
>>> write without making some sort of wrapper around them.
>>>
>>> Still, I'd love to hear how you guys would do it.
>>
>> if the dictionary is small and speed not important, you can wrap it 
>> in a class catching __getitem__ and __setitem__ and testing
>> if repr(self) changes.

IMHO, that's too much.

> d = {1: [a, b],
>       2: [b, c]}
> 
> d[1][0] = 3
> 
> How would this work? __getitem__() will be called once, to get a 
> reference to the list, and so there's no opportunity to compare the 
> 'before' and 'after' repr() values.

I think tracking whether a dict gets modified should in fact only
trace changes to the dict, not to elements contained in the dict.
So __repr__ is probably too much, and also not the intent.

I'd just overwrite __setitem__ for write access to the dict.
Enforcing tracking of all contents is hard (as you showed above)
and probably not really needed.

If further tracking is reasonable, then one would continue and
patch contained lists as well.

my 0.2 € - chris

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