It's interesting that he concludes that freezing dicts is "not especially useful" after addressing only a single motivation: the use of a dictionary as a key.

He doesn't address the reason that most of us in 2025 immediately think of, which is that it's easier to reason about code if you know that certain values can't change after they're created.

What a change in culture over the last 20 years!

▲

morshu9001 2 days ago | parent [-]

You can't really tell though. Maybe the dict is frozen but the values inside aren't. C++ tried to handle this with constness, but that has its own caveats that make some people argue against using it.

▲

krick 2 days ago | parent [-]

Indeed. So I don't really understand what this proposal tries to achieve. It even explicitly says that dict → frozendict will be O(n) shallow-copy, and the contention is only about O(n) part. So… yeah, I'm sure they are useful for some cases, but as Raymond has said — it doesn't seem to be especially useful, and I don't understand what people ITT are getting excited about.

	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	morshu9001 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Maybe treating Python like a systems language, so applying the same reasoning for const in C++ and Rust to it