Best way to turn word list into frequency dict

Question

What\'s the best way to convert a list/tuple into a dict where the keys are the distinct values of the list and the values are the the frequencies of those distinct values?<

Answer 1

I have to share an interesting but kind of ridiculous way of doing it that I just came up with:

>>> class myfreq(dict):
...     def __init__(self, arr):
...         for k in arr:
...             self[k] = 1
...     def __setitem__(self, k, v):
...         dict.__setitem__(self, k, self.get(k, 0) + v)
... 
>>> myfreq(['a', 'b', 'b', 'a', 'b', 'c'])
{'a': 2, 'c': 1, 'b': 3}