how do you get the name of a dictionary?

[Steve Holden]

MonkeeSage wrote:
> Simon Brunning wrote:
> 
>>It's not inconcevable that Python could behave that way, it's just
>>that it would impose an overhead on the 99.999% of Python users who
>>would have no use for the feature. It's a price not worth paying.
> 
> 
> I guess I don't get the problem with the OP's request, either. There is
> already a name<->identifier mapping in place for objects. You can type
> the object name and python magically gives you the object by matching
> the name to the identifier. It would probably be pretty simple to
> expose the name or names associated with the identifier, if any, via

Probably? Based on what assumptions (or knowledge of interpreter internals)?

> built-in function or method. There would be no extra overhead. There
> would be no speed hit if you didn't call the function/method. There
> would be very little implementation expense (I would imagine), as the

Which demonstrates that imagination is a wonderful thing ...

> code that is already in place to do look-ups from the parser to the
> object map could probably be reused or hooked into. But seeing as it
> isn't a general-purpose feature, and Steven's function would be
> sufficient for most cases, I'm not saying it should be a core feature;
> I'm just saying that I don't see what the big huff is about.
> 
I don't think there's any big huff. It's just that Python has achieved 
its current popularity largely by avoiding bloat and feature creep. As 
you observe (or seem to), there isn't a one-to-one mapping between names 
and objects anyway.

Put more simply, objects don't *have* names -- names are bound to 
objects. So modifying the interpreter in the ways you suggest would add 
unnecessary code to the compiler purely to meet a bogus requirement.

regards
  Steve
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