Why can’t I use a list as a dict key in python?

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There’s a good article on the topic in the Python wiki: Why Lists Can’t Be Dictionary Keys. As explained there:

What would go wrong if you tried to use lists as keys, with the hash as, say, their memory location?

It can be done without really breaking any of the requirements, but it leads to unexpected behavior. Lists are generally treated as if their value was derived from their content’s values, for instance when checking (in-)equality. Many would – understandably – expect that you can use any list [1, 2] to get the same key, where you’d have to keep around exactly the same list object. But lookup by value breaks as soon as a list used as key is modified, and for lookup by identity requires you to keep around exactly the same list – which isn’t requires for any other common list operation (at least none I can think of).

Other objects such as modules and object make a much bigger deal out of their object identity anyway (when was the last time you had two distinct module objects called sys?), and are compared by that anyway. Therefore, it’s less surprising – or even expected – that they, when used as dict keys, compare by identity in that case as well.

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