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Discussion about PEP 234: iterators

Russell E. Owen owen at astroNOJNK.washington.edu.invalid
Fri Feb 16 12:41:05 EST 2001 
This is in reaction to the new iterator proposal 
<http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0234.html>:

My own reaction is "great!" one misgiving: it does not address a very 
common need: to iterate over a dictionary in key-sorted order. Is there 
some variant syntax that could handle this case?

(Better yet, and going out on thin ice here, could this be made the 
default? I realize that's unlikely and may anger some people to even 
suggest it, but I would like to point out that some languages actually 
store dictionaries with their keys ordered, so it's at least technically 
feasible).

If this issue cannot be addressed, could we at least get "sort" to 
return the sorted collection, so one could do:

for key in dictionary.keys().sort():

-- Russell
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