[Python-ideas] Implement __add__ for set and frozenset

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On 3 Jun 2008, at 02:21, George Sakkis wrote:

> Regardless of the operator, that's a pretty inefficient way of doing  
> "unionall"; it creates N-1 intermediate result sets that discards  
> them right after they are added. It should be written as:
>
> big_u = set()
> for s in all_sets:
>     big_u.update(s)
>
> I wouldn't mind having a standard unionall, but not every 3-line  
> function has to be in the stdlib.
>
> George
>


Perhaps it would be nice to have set.union (and set.intersection) to  
accept more than one argument, i.e. have

     A = S.union(T, U, V)

mean

     A = S.union(T)
     A.update(U)
     A.update(V)

As a consequence of Python method implementation, one could write  
instead:

     A = set.union(S, T, U, V)
     B = set.intersection(S, T, U, V)

which reads nicely

-- 
Arnaud