Mike Meyer wrote: >>>Personally, I think we'd be better off to come up with a term for this >>>property that doesn't have a commonly understood meaning that has such >>>broad areas of disagreement with the property. I've been using >>>"hashable", which I would currently define as "has a __hash__ method >>>with the properties described in the __hash__ documentation, or does >>>not have either a __cmp__ or a __eq__ method." >> >>I would like to use "hashable" as a term as well, but it appears that >>many people would understand that to mean "has a __hash__ >>implementation" (i.e. hash(x) returns a value, instead of raising an >>exception). > > > Well, the two aren't quite the same thing: hash returns a value on > some things that don't have a __hash__. But that is close to the > meaning I want to give it. What meaning did you have in mind?
Me, personally, I had your definition in mind: hashable should indicate "returns a value constant over time and consistent with comparison". I suggested that most people would consider "hashable" to mean: hash() returns a value. To those people, it is a minor detail whether you get the fallback implementation of hash() or whether there is a default __hash__ implementation for all objects that don't otherwise define __hash__. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
