Are dicts supposed to raise comparison errors

[Paul Moore]

On 31 July 2018 at 08:40, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> wrote:
> A bitbucket user complains that python 3.6.6 with -Wall -b prints warnings
> for some reportlab code; the
> example boils down to the following
>
> ##########
> C:\code\hg-repos\reportlab\tmp>cat tb.py
> if __name__=='__main__':
>     d={'a':1}
>     d[b'a'] = d['a']
> ##########
>
>
> C:\code\hg-repos\reportlab\tmp>\python36\python -Wall -b tb.py
> tb.py:3: BytesWarning: Comparison between bytes and string
>   d[b'a'] = d['a']
>
> I had always assumed that dicts didn't care about the type of keys although
> some types might cause issue with hashability, but obviously the
> implementation seems to be comparing b'a' with 'a' (I suppose because they
> hash to the same chain).
>
> Is this code erroneous or is the warning spurious or wrong?

The warning seems right to me. Behaviour differs between Python 2 and Python 3:

>py -Wall -b
Python 3.7.0 (v3.7.0:1bf9cc5093, Jun 27 2018, 04:59:51) [MSC v.1914 64
bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> b'a' == 'a'
__main__:1: BytesWarning: Comparison between bytes and string
False
>>> ^Z

>py -2
Python 2.7.12 (v2.7.12:d33e0cf91556, Jun 27 2016, 15:24:40) [MSC
v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> b'a' == 'a'
True
>>> b'a' == u'a'
True
>>>

which is basically the sort of thing that -b should warn about.
Specifically the quoted code would end up with a dictionary with 2
entries on Python 3, but 1 entry on Python 2.

Paul