Rather than adding a parameter to return a copied version of the empress dictionary object, I decided to provided a warning in the doc string stating that to_dict returns references to internal objects. As @gwarmstrong mentioned in #470, its seems kind of wasteful to copy the object and since python does not technically have private variables I decided to simply return the dictionary object as is.
In response to #470.
Rather than adding a parameter to return a copied version of the empress dictionary object, I decided to provided a warning in the doc string stating that to_dict returns references to internal objects. As @gwarmstrong mentioned in #470, its seems kind of wasteful to copy the object and since python does not technically have private variables I decided to simply return the dictionary object as is.