"Raymond Hettinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The rationale is to replace the awkward and slow existing idioms for > dictionary > based accumulation: > > d[key] = d.get(key, 0) + qty > d.setdefault(key, []).extend(values) > > In simplest form, those two statements would now be coded more readably as: > > d.count(key) > d.appendlist(key, value)
Yuck. The relatively recent "improvement" of the dict constructor signature (``dict(foo=bar,...)``) obviously makes it impossible to just extend the constructor to ``dict(default=...)`` (or anything else for that matter) which would seem much less ad hoc. But why not use a classmethod (e.g. ``d=dict.withdefault(0)``) then? Or, for the first and most common case, just a bag type? 'as -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
