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[Python-Dev] defaultdict proposal round three

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Feb 22 08:47:40 CET 2006 
Raymond Hettinger wrote:

> Like "autodict" could mean anything.

Everything is meaningless until you know something
about it. If you'd never seen Python before,
would you know what 'dict' meant?

If I were seeing "defaultdict" for the first time,
I would need to look up the docs before I was
confident I knew exactly what it did -- as I've
mentioned before, my initial guess would have
been wrong. The same procedure would lead me to
an understanding of 'autodict' just as quickly.

Maybe 'autodict' isn't the best term either --
I'm open to suggestions. But my instincts still
tell me that 'defaultdict' is the best term
for something *else* that we might want to add
one day as well, so I'm just trying to make
sure we don't squander it lightly.

--
Greg
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