Different types of dicts with letter before the curly braces.

[Colin J. Williams]

Stefan Behnel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this kind of stuff is commonly discussed on the python-ideas mailing list.
> You might want to search that list and/or repost this over there.
> 
> Stefan
> 
> kindly wrote:
>> I am sure people have thought of this before, but I cant find where.
>> I think that python should adapt a way of defining different types of
>> mapping functions by proceeding a letter before the curly brackets.
>> i.e   ordered = o{},  multidict = m{}  (like paste multidict).  So you
>> could define an ordered dict by newordered = o{"llvm" : "ptyhon",
>> "parrot" : "perl"} .  (they should also probably have there own
>> comprehensions as well o{foo for bar in foobar}).
>>
>> People nowadays think in terms of hashes and lists (especially with
>> jsons and javascript not going away} and most of my time seems to be
>> spent in different ways to store bits of data in memory in this way.
>> It also seems to be the way to think in python (an object or a class
>> object are just mappings themselves) Most packages that I have seen re-
>> implement these different container types at one point anyway. It
>> seems a shame they are not brought up to the top level, with
>> potentially new, cleverer ones that have not been thought of yet.
>> There will be potential to add different letters to the start when it
>> seems that a certain mapping pattern seems in popular use.
>>
>> Am I crazy to think this is a good idea?  I have not looked deeply
>> pythons grammer to see if it conflicts with anything, but on the
>> surface it looks fine.

This has some appeal in the light of Python 3.1's ordered dictionary.

Colin W.