Freeze

Freeze provides frozen (immutable) implementations of the basic Python collections - dict, set and list.

While there are built-in immutable versions for list (tuple) and set (frozenset), they are not always a good replacement for their mutable counterparts:

• tuple can store mutable objects so its immutability is not guaranteed.
• frozenset will raise an exception if you try to initialize it with any mutable object.
• dict doesn't have a built-in immutable version.

Freeze introduces the following collections: FDict, FSet and FList.

They are immutable, hashable, type-hinted, and will attempt to convert mutable data to an equivalent immutable representation on initialization.

Freezing is achieved by following a simple logic recursively:

• Immutable objects stay the same (except for collections).
• Any Mapping (e.g. dict) is converted to an FDict.
• Any AbstractSet (e.g. set) is converted to an FSet.
• Any Sequence (e.g. list or tuple) is converted to an FList.

Attempting to initialize any Freeze collection with un-freezable objects will raise an exception.

Issues:

• Type hints are only accurate as long as no data conversion was performed.

Future Plans:

• support for thawing.
• support for freezing more types.