If python dictionaries are inherently orderless, why were they given the name if a real dictionary is sorted by letter?
4th February 2012
My answer to If python dictionaries are inherently orderless, why were they given the name if a real dictionary is sorted by letter? on Quora
The metaphor here is that paper dictionaries make it easy to look stuff up by letter or word—just like Python dictionaries make looking something up by key an instant operation.
I don’t know of any other languages that use the word “dictionary” for this—Perl and Ruby call them Hashes, PHP calls them Associative Arrays, JavaScript calls them Objects, Lua calls them Tables. Personally I find the term dictionary more intuitive than those alternatives but I do spend way more of my time with Python.
More recent articles
- Notes on the new Claude analysis JavaScript code execution tool - 24th October 2024
- Initial explorations of Anthropic's new Computer Use capability - 22nd October 2024
- Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week - 21st October 2024