BTW, one lesson to take from SETL: a vital set operation in practice is a mutating "pick a 'random' element E from the set, remove it from the set, and return it". An enormous number of set algorithms are of the form
while not S.empty(): pick some element from S deal with it, possibly mutating S
This operation can't be done efficiently in Python code if the set is represented by a dict (the best you can do is materialize the full list of keys first, and pick one of those). That means my Set class often takes quadratic time for what *should* be linear-time algorithms.
Hmmm...actually, I've been wanting a method .key() for dictionaries a long time. So if we give dictionaries this one small method, then we *can* do this in Python. -- Moshe Zadka <sig@zadka.site.co.il> This is a signature anti-virus. Please stop the spread of signature viruses!