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

[Dan Bishop]

On Jul 5, 10:19 pm, a... at mac.com (Alex Martelli) wrote:
> Neil Cerutti <horp... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Besides, a string is an excellent epresentation for a zip code,
> > since arithmetic upon them is unthinkable.
>
> Absolutely!  Excel, unless you remedied that later with a column
> operation, would turn some East Coast zipcodes into 3- and 4-digit
> numbers (dropping the leading 0s), exactly because it's so obtuse as to
> try to "treat as numbers" entries that are all-digits.

What's even worse is having it treat credit card numbers as numbers.
Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if they were 15 digits.  But
they're 16 digits.