Instances as dictionary key, __hash__ and __eq__

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/18/2013 2:51 PM, Jean-Michel Pichavant wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I opened something like a month ago a thread about hash functions and how I could write classes which instances can be safely used as dictionary keys.
> I though I had it but when I read back my code, I think I wrote yet another bug.
>
> Consider the following simple (buggy) class, python 2.5
>
> class FooSet(object):
>      """Define an algorithm set, containing pdcch/pdsch (or none)."""
>      def __init__(self, pdcch, pdsch):
>          self.pdcch = bool(pdcch)
>          self.pdsch = bool(pdsch)
>      # __hash__ and __eq__ allow to use the object as a dictionary key
>      def __hash__(self):
>          return hash((self.pdcch, self.pdsch))
>      def __eq__(self, other):
>          return hash(self) == hash(other)
>
> Can you confirm that using the hash function for testing equality is a very bad idea ?
>
> One obvious solution would be:
>
> def __eq__(self, other):
>      return self.pdsch = other.pdsch and self.pdcch == other.pdcch
>
> But I was looking for a "standard" solution, that I could use for basically all my container classes
>
> So I came up with these ones:
>
> def __hash__(self):
>      return hash(tuple(vars(self).values()))
> def __eq__(self, other):
>      return vars(self) == vars(other)
>
> But I'm not sure about vars(self).values(), I don't really care about the order of the values, but I need to be sure that for 2 equal dictionaries, they will both return their values in the same order.

No, you cannot depend on that in general even though it may work in 
specific cases.

> And that's the point, I'm not sure at all.
>
> Additionally,  If I'm making things much more complicated than they need to be, let me know.
>
> Cheers,
>
> JM
>
>
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-- 
Terry Jan Reedy