Order of tuples in dict.items()

Erik Jones erik at myemma.com
Mon Oct 15 19:46:28 EDT 2007


On Oct 15, 2007, at 6:07 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:11:27 -0700, John Machin wrote:
>
>> On Oct 16, 12:47 am, Erik Jones <e... at myemma.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Not between two consecutive reads, no.  However, after any  
>>> resizing of
>>> a dict the result of Python's hash function for any given newly
>>> inserted key is extremely likely to be different than it would have
>>> been before the resizing, i.e. the method may be the same, but the
>>> result is different.
>>
>> Could you please supply the basis for the above assertion? My  
>> reading of
>> the docs for the built-in hash function, the docs for an object's
>> __hash__ method, and the source (dictobject.c, intobject.c,
>> stringobject.c) indicate (as I would have expected) that the hash  
>> of an
>> object is determined solely by the object itself, not by the  
>> history of
>> insertion into a dict (or multiple dicts!?).
>>
>> Note that position_in dict = some_function(hash(obj),  
>> size_of_dict) ...
>> perhaps you are conflating two different concepts.
>
>
> The hash() function doesn't even take a dictionary as an argument  
> -- it
> simply can't be dependent on the history of insertions into the
> dictionary, because it can't know what dictionary to look at!
>
> But as you say, the position in the dictionary itself depends on the
> result of the hash function, and the size of the dictionary, and  
> what's
> already in the dict (that is to say, the history of insertions and
> deletions). That's how hash tables work.

John, sorry, I never saw your reply to my initial posting.  What I  
was referring to was indeed the some_function in your example, not  
the actual hash() function available in the standard library.  I was  
in no way conflating the two, the confusing is just one over the  
terminology as some_function IS a hash function.

Erik Jones

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