Guido van Rossum wrote:
My gut tells me it is bad API design to collapse these two use cases. Probably because the implementations won't have much in common: (1) should just pick the first valid element, while (2) should use the normal hash lookup algorithm (shared with 'in', .add() etc.).
As a side note, a fairly obvious method name for "add if missing and then return canonical representation" did occur to me: s.intern(x)
I'd be -0 on expanding the set API for this though (since the cookbook recipe overloading __eq__ already provides an efficient solution).
As far as the moratorium in general goes, perhaps we should draw a line between API changes that affect the ABCs in collections and numbers and new convenience methods on the builtin types themselves?
Cheers, Nick.