Where is the syntax for the dict() constructor ?!

[John Machin]

On Jul 6, 5:31 am, Neil Cerutti <horp... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Mostly you can use the default 'excel' dialect and be quite
> happy, since Excel is the main reason anybody still cares about
> this unecessarily hard to parse (it requires more than one
> character of lookahead for no reason except bad design) data
> format.

One cares about this format because people create data files of
millions of rows (far exceeding the capacity of Excel (pre-2007)) in
many imaginative xSV dialects, some of which are not handled by the
Python csv module.

I don't know what you mean by "requires more than one
character of lookahead" -- any non-Mickey-Mouse implementation of a
csv reader will use a finite state machine with about half-a-dozen
states, and data structures no more complicated than (1) completed
rows received so far (2) completed fields in current row (3) bytes in
current field. When a new input byte arrives, what to do can be
determined based on only that byte and the current state; no look-
ahead into the input stream is required, nor is any look-back into
those data structures.