On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 11:32:14AM -0600, Jason E. Sibre wrote:
> I guess that's because it's now lazier than it was, only looking
> up (and wrapping) what is must, rather than wrapping everything in
> the dict which, in the usual case of vars(), could be much more
> than is really needed.

Perhaps.  I can also imagine that some people might want to create
dict-like objects that have a huge number of keys.  In those cases,
trying to call items() would be bad.  Using __getitem__ matches what
the string object does and should provide the least number of
surprises.

  Neil