I am looking to create a dictionary with 'roll-back' capabilities in python. The dictionary would start with a revision number of 0, and the revision would be bumped up only by explicit method call. I do not need to delete keys, only add and update key,value pairs, and then roll back. I will never need to 'roll forward', that is, when rolling the dictionary back, all the newer revisions can be discarded, and I can start re-reving up again. thus I want behaviour like:

>>> rr = rev_dictionary()
>>> rr.rev
0
>>> rr["a"] = 17
>>> rr[('b',23)] = 'foo'
>>> rr["a"]
17
>>> rr.rev
0
>>> rr.roll_rev()
>>> rr.rev
1
>>> rr["a"]
17
>>> rr["a"] = 0
>>> rr["a"]
0
>>> rr[('b',23)]
'foo'
>>> rr.roll_to(0)
>>> rr.rev
0
>>> rr["a"]
17
>>> rr.roll_to(1)
Exception ... 

Just to be clear, the state associated with a revision is the state of the dictionary just prior to the roll_rev() method call. thus if I can alter the value associated with a key several times 'within' a revision, and only have the last one remembered.

I would like a fairly memory-efficient implementation of this: the memory usage should be proportional to the deltas. Thus simply having a list of copies of the dictionary will not scale for my problem. One should assume the keys are in the tens of thousands, and the revisions are in the hundreds of thousands.

We can assume the values are immutable, but need not be numeric. For the case where the values are e.g. integers, there is a fairly straightforward implementation (have a list of dictionaries of the numerical delta from revision to revision). I am not sure how to turn this into the general form. Maybe bootstrap the integer version and add on an array of values?

all help appreciated.