[Tim]
BTW, what should
{1, 2} | {3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
return as ordered sets? Beats me.;
[Larry]
The obvious answer is {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}.
Why? An obvious implementation that doesn't ignore performance entirely is: def union(smaller, larger): if len(larger) < len(smaller): smaller, larger = larger, smaller result = larger.copy() for x in smaller: result.add(x) In the example, that would first copy {3, 4, 5, 6, 7}, and then add 1 and 2 (in that order) to it, giving {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2} as the result. If it's desired that "insertion order" be consistent across runs, platforms, and releases, then what "insertion order" _means_ needs to be rigorously defined & specified for all set operations. This was comparatively trivial for dicts, because there are, e.g., no commutative binary operators defined on dicts. If you want to insist that `a | b` first list all the elements of a, and then all the elements of b that weren't already in a, regardless of cost, then you create another kind of unintuitive surprise: in general the result of "a | b" will display differently than the result of "b | a" (although the results will compare equal), and despite that the _user_ didn't "insert" anything.