On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 9:06 PM, Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 1:20 AM, Steven D'Aprano >> <steve+comp.lang.python@**pearwood.info<steve%2bcomp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info>> >> wrote: >> >>> (Although if you think about the implementation of dicts as hash tables, >>> it does seem likely that it is trivial to enforce this -- one would have >>> to work *harder* to break that promise than to keep it.) >>> >> >> However, it would be quite reasonable to implement a dict as a splay >> tree, and have values() return them nearest-first. This would mean >> that just reading from the dictionary could change the order of >> values(), yet it wouldn't make the implementation non-conformant. >> > > Yes, it would. The docs say that .keys(), .values(), etc., will maintain > order unless the dict is modified in between calls. > > ~Ethan~ > -- > http://mail.python.org/**mailman/listinfo/python-list<http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list> > On the other hand, it's a somewhat far-out thing to guarantee. If some things were relaxed a bit for the benefit of alternative implementations, I'd think this could be one of the things. I certainly wouldn't want to write code that depends on such a behavior, if nothing else because someday I might want to use a dict-like-object that doesn't provide such a guarantee.
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