Mapping, with sequence as key, wildcard and subsequence matching

[Mark Lawrence]

On 16/07/2015 07:37, Ben Finney wrote:
> Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> writes:
>
>> On 07/15/2015 10:53 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
>>> Are those the ‘__contains__’, ‘__getitem__’ methods? What actually
>>> is the API of a mapping type, that would need to be customised for
>>> this application?
>>
>> The problem is that potential key matches are found by hashes
>
> For the Python ‘dict’ type, yes. I already know that I don't want that
> type, I want a custom mapping type which matches keys according to the
> algorithm I specify.
>
> So, I'm not asking “how do I make ‘dict’ do this?”. I am instead asking
> “how do I implement a custom type which can duck-type for ‘dict’ but
> have a different key-lookup implementation?”.
>

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html?emulating-container-types 


<quote>
The collections module provides a MutableMapping abstract base class to 
help create those methods from a base set of __getitem__(), 
__setitem__(), __delitem__(), and keys()
</quote>

Hence 
https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html#collections.abc.MutableMapping

Hunting for examples got me to 
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578096-a-mutablemapping-that-can-use-unhashable-objects-a/ 
so fingers crossed, I'm just hoping that we're going in the right direction.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence