I agree that syntactic sugar for Dict literal construction would be 
appreciated. There were good reasons for removing the previous syntax, but 
I think it should be possible to find something more terse than the status 
quo. 

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015 at 12:45:08 PM UTC-4, Michael Francis wrote:
>
> With the change to 0.4 happening soon I'm finding the the new Dict syntax 
> in 0.4 (removal of {}, []) is extremely verbose.
>
> I find myself interfacing with JSON APIs frequently, for example a 
> configuration dictionary :
>
> data = {
>         :displayrows => 20,
>         :cols => [
>                     { :col => "l1" },
>                     { :col => "l2" },
>                     { :col => "l3" },
>                     { :col => "num", :display => true },
>                     { :col => "sum", :display => true, :conf => { :style 
> => 1, :func => { :method => "sum", :col => "num"  } } }
>                 ]  
>        ... # Lots more   
>     }
>
> becomes -
>
> data = Dict{Symbol,Any}(
>         :displayrows => 20,
>         :cols => [
>                     Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "l1" ),
>                     Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "l2" ),
>                     Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "l3"   ),
>                     Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "num", :display => true ),
>                     Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "sum", :display => true, :conf 
> => Dict{Symbol,Any}( :style => 1, 
>                                                                     :func 
> => Dict{Symbol,Any}( :method => "sum", :col => "num" ) ) )
>                 ]  
>        ... # Lots more
>     )
>
> This feels like asking a person using arrays to write the following
>
> Array{Int64,2}( Vector{Int64}( 1,2,3), Vector{Int64}( 4,5,6) )
>
> vs
>
> [ [ 1, 2, 3] [ 4,5,6 ] ]
>
> Can we please reconsider ?
>
>

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