24 Oct
2009
24 Oct
'09
9:37 p.m.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:
To me, however, a set seems to be a container that is a specialization of a dict with values and keys being the same.
That's absurd; the mapping provides nothing useful.
Given Alexander's premise, I agree with your response. But his premise is wrong. Python's current builtin set class maps abstract equivalence classes to representative members. And this *is* useful. Mapping arbitrary members of such classes to representative members, sometimes called 'canonical', is a standard problem/goal in math. String interning is an application of this idea. Terry Jan Reedy