Python dicts are now ordered

Re:Python dicts are now ordered by coldtea on Friday February 07, 2020 @04:21PM (#22271089)

>You start with an _empty_ array, then (somehow) set the third element of that array? That makes very little sense.

Well, there's no reason a language could not initialize an empty array to some initial capacity, either on declaration or when you add an indexed element.

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Re:Python dicts are now ordered by kingdomcome50 on Monday February 10, 2020 @05:22PM (#22294057)

I guess my reasoning is that:

$arr = []

doesn't appear to be initializing to any capacity. So that after:

$arr[2] = "two"

I would expect:

count($arr) === 1

And honestly, sure. A language could be designed to pad the array with empty values if you specify an index greater than the upper bound (or lesser than the lower bound). I believe a sibling mentioned matlab did something like that.

But is that really better behavior or just different behavior? I don't really see an important difference. My point was that the criticism was fairly weak. PHP, indeed, has a very useful abstraction in its concept of "array". Most of the hate should be directed at the name, not the construct.

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