On 09.07.20 14:25, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 9:16 PM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
Unless I have missed any others, we've only seen three use-cases:
(a) The original post wanted a full sequence API for dictionaries, with
the ability to insert keys at a specific index, not just get the N-th
key. Not going to happen.
(b) You've suggested "get any item", but that's probably better written
as `next(mydict.items)`.
(c) And `random.choice(mydict.items())` which seems to be lacking any
*concrete* use-case -- under what circumstances would we want this and
care about it's performance *enough* to add this to builtin dict views?
Getting a random element from a dict (not an arbitrary one but a
random one) definitely does have a use-case. I've wanted it at times.
This doesn't seem to be an argument for modifying dict views since the
actual "issue" lies with `random.choice` and the way it can (or cannot)
interact with the containers its given. Even when implemented on dict
views, this still won't for work for sets for example. And it's
definitely reasonable to ask "pick a random element from this set" (in
terms or real world language). But from the perspective of the set API
there is no way to pick specific elements and hence it must either rely
on conversion to a sequence or rely on implementation details of the set
data structure. So if the use case is to get a random element from a
dict, the discussion should rather be centered around `random.choice`
and also respect other non-sequence containers.
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/G776ZD7MHSBSRC3B5WMZ3EJPL4GYKCXG/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
