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Author doerwalter
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Date 2006-12-20.12:59:18
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To clear up some apparent misunderstandings: This patch does *not* advocate that some dict methods should be implemented by calling other dict methods so that dict subclasses only have to overwrite a few methods to gain a completely consistent implementation.

This patch only fixes the dict constructor (and update()) and consists of two parts:

(1) There are three code paths in dictobject.c::dict_update_common(): (a) if the constructor argument doesn't have a "keys" attribute treat it as a iterable of items; (b) if the argument has a "keys" attribute, but is not a dict (and not an instance of a subclass of dict), use keys() and __getitem__() to make a copy of the mapping-like object. (c) if the argument has a "keys" attribute and is a dict (or an instance of a subclass of dict) bypass any of the overwritten methods that the object might provide and directly use the dict implementation. This patch changes PyDict_Merge() so that code path (b) is used for dict constructor arguments that are subclasses of dict, so that any overwritten methods are honored.

(2) This means that now if a subclass of dict is passed to the constructor or update() the code is IMHO more correct (it honors the reimplemenation of the mapping methods), but slower. To reduce the slowdown instead of using kesY() and __getitem__(), iterkeys() and __getitem__() are used.

I can't see why the current behaviour should be better: Yes, it is faster, but it is also wrong: Without the patch the behaviour of dict() and dict.update() depends on the fact whether the argument happens to subclass dict or not. If it doesn't all is well: the argument is treated as a mapping (i.e. keys() and __getitem__() are used) otherwise the methods are completely ignored.

So can we agree on the fact that (1) is desirable? (At least Guido said as much: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-December/070341.html)

BTW, I only added PyMapping_Iterkeys() because it mirrors PyMapping_Keys().
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Date User Action Args
2007-08-23 15:55:43adminlinkissue1615701 messages
2007-08-23 15:55:43admincreate