Re: Vala bindings for epiphany?

[Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Wouter Bolsterlee <uws xs4all nl> wrote:
> Op zaterdag 03-10-2009 om 22:40 uur [tijdzone +0300], schreef Xan Lopez:
>> On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus therning org> wrote:
>> >> Objects in JavaScript are dictionaries (I mean, even the syntax is the
>> >> same...), and I'm sure there's plenty of implementations of data structures
>> >> like Python sets around.
>> >
>> > No, they are "dictionary-like", not proper dictionaries.  For instance keys
>> > can only be strings or numbers.
>>
>> So what else can be a key in Python dictionaries exactly? The
>> documentation mentions a tuple of immutable objects, which I guess can
>> have its uses, but saying that javascript does not have dictionaries
>> (or only "dictionary-like" objects) because of this seems a bit over
>> the top to be honest.
>
> Anything that can be hashed can be used as a dictionary key. For
> objects, the key can be simply the memory address. This is very useful
> for object-to-something dictionaries.

Anything that can be hashed can be used as a key in any dictionary
type, that's a borderline tautology :). The point is what kind of
python object can be used as a key in a python dictionary without any
other intermediate step. The documentation seems to imply you can only
use immutable things, which seems reasonable but is not, IMHO, so
superior to the JS implementation to warrant saying that JS's are not
real dictionaries.

In any case this is not really very relevant, I just wanted to point
out that dictionaries are a pretty core type in JS, so saying they do
not exist is not true. They are not exactly like Python's? Sure.

Xan

>
>    — Wouter
>