Fixing tests

Posted Apr 12, 2012 20:22 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Fixing tests by dskoll
Parent article: Python 2.6.8, 2.7.3, 3.1.5, and 3.2.3 security release

My mistake, Gecko and WebKit return keys in insertion order, not alphabetical. And it is not javascript arrays but objects; as you probably know, Javascript Does Not Support Associative Arrays

By the way, PHP also returns keys in insertion order, this time with real associative arrays. It is a nice feature IMHO; it may have some overhead but the results are much more intuitive than with Python's dicts. In a certain sense these other languages are hiding the details of the implementation, so that e.g. primitive testing schemes do not rely on the particular hashing function used.

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Fixing tests

Posted Apr 12, 2012 20:41 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (2 responses)

Why dont you use OrderedDicts from python's collections module, if that is what you want?

Fixing tests

Posted Apr 12, 2012 20:50 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Why, OrderedDicts didn't exist when I began coding eLyXer (and Python in general). Even if they had, they are new in Python 3.1 and I am still using Python 2. And I wanted to maintain compatibility back to Python 2.4 (Debian oldstable at the time), now back to Python 2.5.

Also, I did not know that I might eventually need insertion order at the time. I am guessing that also pure inertia might have played a role, although if OrderedDicts keep the same interface (and it appears that they do) that would make the switch quite painless. So I have at least three good reasons and two good excuses :)

Fixing tests

Posted Apr 13, 2012 6:54 UTC (Fri) by cathectic (guest, #40543) [Link]

There is a backport of it for older Python releases all the way back to 2.4:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ordereddict

Fixing tests

Posted Apr 13, 2012 13:10 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

By the way, PHP also returns keys in insertion order, this time with real associative arrays. It is a nice feature IMHO

I don't like the fact that PHP treats arrays and hashes as the same thing. I would prefer a different syntax for a numerically-indexed array than for an associative array. I would also rather that hashes don't return keys in insertion order by default. PHP should provide a separate data type similar to Python's OrderedDict for those times you want insertion order respected and are willing to pay the overhead.

Fixing tests

Posted Apr 13, 2012 14:17 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'd much prefer that PHP provide basic things like a working < operator before moving on to such advanced features!