Ned Batchelder: Ordered dict surprises

Since Python 3.6, regular dictionaries retain their insertion order: when you iterate over a dict, you get the items in the same order they were added to the dict. Before 3.6, dicts were unordered: the iteration order was seemingly random.

Here are two surprising things about these ordered dicts.

You can’t get the first item

Since the items in a dict have a specific order, it should be easy to get the first (or Nth) item, right? Wrong. It’s not possible to do this directly. You might think that d[0] would be the first item, but it’s not, it’s the value of the key 0, which could be the last item added to the dict.

The only way to get the Nth item is to iterate over the dict, and wait until you get to the Nth item. There’s no random access by ordered index. This is one place where lists are better than dicts. Getting the Nth element of a list is an O(1) operation. Getting the Nth element of a dict (even if it is ordered) is an O(N) operation.

OrderedDict is a little different

If dicts are ordered now, collections.OrderedDict is useless, right? Well, maybe. It won’t be removed because that would break code using that class, and it has some methods that regular dicts don’t. But there’s also one subtle difference in behavior. Regular dicts don’t take order into account when comparing dicts for equality, but OrderedDicts do:

>>> d1 = {"a": 1, "b": 2}
>>> d2 = {"b": 2, "a": 1}
>>> d1 == d2
True
>>> list(d1)
['a', 'b']
>>> list(d2)
['b', 'a']

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> od1 = OrderedDict([("a", 1), ("b", 2)])
>>> od2 = OrderedDict([("b", 2), ("a", 1)])
>>> od1 == od2
False
>>> list(od1)
['a', 'b']
>>> list(od2)
['b', 'a']
>>>


BTW, this post is the result of a surprisingly long and contentious discussion in the Python Discord.

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