Immutable dictionary, only use as a key for another dictionary

The Mapping abstract base class makes this easy to implement:

import collections

class ImmutableDict(collections.Mapping):
    def __init__(self, somedict):
        self._dict = dict(somedict)   # make a copy
        self._hash = None

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        return self._dict[key]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._dict)

    def __iter__(self):
        return iter(self._dict)

    def __hash__(self):
        if self._hash is None:
            self._hash = hash(frozenset(self._dict.items()))
        return self._hash

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return self._dict == other._dict

If you are only using it as a key for another dict, you could go for frozenset(mutabledict.items()). If you need to access the underlying mappings, you could then use that as the parameter to dict.

mutabledict = dict(zip('abc', range(3)))
immutable = frozenset(mutabledict.items())
read_frozen = dict(immutable)
read_frozen['a'] # => 1

Note that you could also combine this with a class derived from dict, and use the frozenset as the source of the hash, while disabling __setitem__, as suggested in another answer. (@RaymondHettinger's answer for code which does just that).