pop method question

Nicholas Parsons parsons.nicholas1 at gmail.com
Sat Mar 3 15:36:08 EST 2007


Howdy Folks,

I was just playing around in IDLE at the interactive prompt and typed  
in dir({}) for the fun of it.  I was quite surprised to see a pop  
method defined there.  I mean is that a misnomer or what?  From the  
literature, pop is supposed to be an operation defined for a stack  
data structure.  A stack is defined to be an "ordered" list data  
structure.  Dictionaries in Python have no order but are sequences.   
Now, does anyone know why the python core has this pop method  
implemented for a dictionary type?

I realize that in this context it is used for removing a specific key  
from the current dictionary object.  But why call it pop and not  
something more intuitive like remove or delete?

Thanks for the clarification in advance :).

--Nick







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