OrderedDicts and OrderedSets

OrderedDicts and OrderedSets

OrderedDicts are simply dictionaries whose entries have a particular order. For OrderedDicts (and OrderedSets), order refers to insertion order, which allows deterministic iteration over the dictionary or set:

d = OrderedDict{Char,Int}()
for c in 'a':'e'
    d[c] = c-'a'+1
end
collect(d) # => [('a',1),('b',2),('c',3),('d',4),('e',5)]

s = OrderedSet(π,e,γ,catalan,φ)
collect(s) # => [π = 3.1415926535897...,
           #     e = 2.7182818284590...,
           #     γ = 0.5772156649015...,
           #     catalan = 0.9159655941772...,
           #     φ = 1.6180339887498...]

All standard Dict functions are available for OrderedDicts, and all Set operations are available for OrderedSets.

Note that to create an OrderedSet of a particular type, you must specify the type in curly-braces:

# create an OrderedSet of Strings
strs = OrderedSet{AbstractString}()