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Sat Feb 18 10:44:15 CET 2006 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-February/061354.html

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On 2/17/06, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
>> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> > d = {}
>> > d.default_factory = set
>> > ...
>> > d[key].add(value)
>>
>> Another option would be:
>>
>>    d = {}
>>    d.default_factory = set
>>    d.get_default(key).add(value)
>>
>> Unlike .setdefault, this would use a factory associated with the dictionary, and no default value would get passed in.
>> Unlike the proposal, this would not override __getitem__ (not overriding
>> __getitem__ is really the only difference with the proposal).  It would be clear reading the code that you were not
>> implicitly asserting they "key in d" was true.
>>
>> "get_default" isn't the best name, but another name isn't jumping out at me at the moment.  Of course, it is not a Pythonic
>> argument to say that an existing method should be overridden, or functionality made nameless simply because we can't think
>> of a name (looking to anonymous functions of course ;)
>
> I'm torn. While trying to implement this I came across some ugliness in PyDict_GetItem() -- it would make sense if this also
> called
> on_missing(), but it must return a value without incrementing its
> refcount, and isn't supposed to raise exceptions -- so what to do if on_missing() returns a value that's not inserted in the
> dict?
>
> If the __getattr__()-like operation that supplies and inserts a
> dynamic default was a separate method, we wouldn't have this problem.
>
> OTOH most reviewers here seem to appreciate on_missing() as a way to do various other ways of alterning a dict's
> __getitem__() behavior behind a caller's back -- perhaps it could even be (ab)used to
> implement case-insensitive lookup.

I don't like the fact that on_missing()/default_factory can change the behaviour of __getitem__, which upto now has been
something simple and understandable.
Why don't we put the on_missing()/default_factory functionality into get() instead?

d.get(key, default) does what it did before. d.get(key) invokes on_missing() (and dict would have default_factory == type(None))

Bye,
   Walter Dörwald

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[Python-Dev] Proposal: defaultdict