Good information, and well put. A small quibble: you should probably almost never use tuple(), even on recent Python: >>> tuple(dict(a=1, b=2).items())

Good information, and well put. A small quibble: you should probably almost never use tuple(), even on recent Python: >>> tuple(dict(a=1, b=2).items()) (('a', 1), ('b', 2)) >>> tuple(dict(b=2, a=1).items()) (('b', 2), ('a', 1)) Of course, if you can absolutely guarantee how the dictionary has been constructed, it is possible. No rules are absolute. But in my experience, frozenset() is probably better: >>> frozenset(dict(a=1, b=2).items()) frozenset({('b', 2), ('a', 1)}) >>> frozenset(dict(b=2, a=1).items()) frozenset({('b', 2), ('a', 1)}) (Or sometimes even id(), as, if you are confident enough that the dictionary is identical, that might be because it came from the same place. If you are building a reverse dictionary, say, or a cache of indices. Though obviously that it is much more situationally dependent.)