Wrong syntax for adding a new key

What this problem practises

Dictionaries fail loudly on a missing key with KeyError, quietly through get(), and in genuinely surprising ways when you modify a dict while iterating it or rely on a duplicate key silently replacing the earlier entry.

This is a fix-the-bug problem: a short program is given in its broken state, and the task is to repair the code so it produces the required output. The interactive editor runs your fixed version in the browser and checks it for you — no setup, no local interpreter.

Difficulty: easy — the fix or the trick is normally a single line, and a careful read should be enough.

The challenge

This should add a new key-value pair, but crashes. Fix it.

The code runs in PyDebug’s in-browser compiler. Open the problem, run the snippet, watch the exact error or output, and keep iterating until it is right. Signed-in solves count toward XP and your daily streak.

The error it raises

Run the broken snippet and Python stops with this exact error: SyntaxError: cannot assign to function call here. Match it to the Python errors guide, then repair the line that produced it — knowing the message is half the fix.

The snippet

The interactive editor pre-fills exactly this code, broken and ready to repair:

person = {"name": "Aditi"}
person("age") = 24
print(person)

More dictionaries problems

• Dictionary update() behavior medium
• Deleting a key that doesn't exist easy
• setdefault() behavior medium

Keep going

• Python debugging guide — a systematic method for finding bugs like this one fast.
• Browse every dictionaries problem in this topic.
• Common Python errors and what they actually mean, plus the Python glossary for any term used on this page.