What is the preferred syntax for initializing a dict: curly brace literals {} or the dict() function?

Curly braces. Passing keyword arguments into dict(), though it works beautifully in a lot of scenarios, can only initialize a map if the keys are valid Python identifiers.

This works:

a = {'import': 'trade', 1: 7.8}

a = dict({'import': 'trade', 1: 7.8})

This won't work:

a = dict(import='trade', 1=7.8)

It will result in the following error:

    a = dict(import='trade', 1=7.8)
             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

The first, curly braces. Otherwise, you run into consistency issues with keys that have odd characters in them, like =.

# Works fine.
a = {
    'a': 'value',
    'b=c': 'value',
}

# Eeep! Breaks if trying to be consistent.
b = dict( 
    a='value',
    b=c='value',
)

The first version is preferable:

• It works for all kinds of keys, so you can, for example, say {1: 'one', 2: 'two'}. The second variant only works for (some) string keys. Using different kinds of syntax depending on the type of the keys would be an unnecessary inconsistency.

• It is faster:

  $ python -m timeit "dict(a='value', another='value')"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.79 usec per loop
  $ python -m timeit "{'a': 'value','another': 'value'}"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.305 usec per loop
  

• If the special syntax for dictionary literals wasn't intended to be used, it probably wouldn't exist.

I think the first option is better because you are going to access the values as a['a'] or a['another']. The keys in your dictionary are strings, and there is no reason to pretend they are not. To me the keyword syntax looks clever at first, but obscure at a second look. This only makes sense to me if you are working with __dict__, and the keywords are going to become attributes later, something like that.