[brian_herman]

Can you do the same thing with dicts and make it so d['non_existant_key'] does not create an exception?

[basdftrewq]

    from collections import defaultdict

    d = defaultdict(int)

    d['non_existant_key']

[st0le]

Not quite the same what OP asked for. This will create the key and assign value 0 to it.

[lauriat]

You can already do that with

  d.get("non_existant_key", default)