Stupid solutions for stupid problems

Emma Smith — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0700

A while back, a friend of mine was working on a coding challenge for some internship. The prompt said to create a dictionary with string keys and string values in your favorite programming language, without using the built in dictionary type.

This got me thinking of how I would solve this, and this terrible monster is what I came up with:

class DumbDict:
    __getitem__ = getattr
    __setitem__ = setattr

This is a very silly solution. I don't feel bad about it. Here it is in action:

>>>d = DumbDict()
>>>d['hi'] = 'test'
>>>d['hi']
'test'

How does it work? Well, in Python __getitem__ is the protocol for subscribtion access. When I write d['hi'] Python internally calls d.__getitem__('hi'). So whats the deal with the getattr call then?

In Python, everything is an object. By default, objects internally map attribute names to values. In my dictionary implementation, I take advantage of this to use Python's internals to create my dictionary.

The pros of this dictionary are that it is fast. It is close (within 10%) of the builtin dictionary type (there is a bit of overhead with function calls).

There are quite a few cons, the first of which several of the more knowledable among you have already realized. I'm totally cheating here. Well, maybe. Or I'm not. Technically, classes use something called types.MappingProxyType to manage attribute mappings. This is however an implementation detail, so its up to personal opinion whether I'm using a built in dictionary or not. Anyway, I think its pretty cool. And remember I did say it was stupid...

Emma's Blog - silly

Stupid solutions for stupid problems