Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar

From	"Marco S." <mail.python.org@marco.sulla.e4ward.com>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.python
Subject	Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar
Date	2016-03-22 20:54 +0100
Message-ID	<mailman.34.1458721359.2244.python-list@python.org> (permalink)

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I noticed that the sequence types does not have these methods that the map
types  has: get(), items(), keys(), values().

It could seem useless to have them for sequences, but I think it will ease
the creation of functions and methods that allow you to input a generic
iterable as parameter, but needs to use one of these methods in case the
parameter is a map.

In one word, it will facilitate duck typing.

For the same reason, I would suggest the introduction of a new map type,
vdict, a dict that by default iterates over values instead over keys. So a
vdict object "d" wiil have iter(d) == iter(d.values()), and should also
have a count() method, like sequence types.

Indeed sequences are, in my humble opinion, a specialized case of maps,
when keys are numeric only, are always contiguous without gaps and start
from 0. This way we will have a simpler way to let people to use sequences
or maps indifferently, and let the code untouched.

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Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar "Marco S." <mail.python.org@marco.sulla.e4ward.com> - 2016-03-22 20:54 +0100
  Re: Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2016-03-23 22:26 +1100
    Re: Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar Marco Sulla <marcosullaroma@gmail.com> - 2016-03-26 01:18 +0100
      Re: Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2016-03-26 22:41 +1100
    Re: Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar Marco Sulla <marcosullaroma@gmail.com> - 2016-03-26 01:35 +0100
    Re: Suggestion: make sequence and map interfaces more similar Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2016-03-26 10:29 +0000

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