Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info writes:
On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:26:27 am Ben Finney wrote:
Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info writes:
The lack of get() in sets and frozensets is sounding more and more to me like the victory of purity over practicality.
What would be the input to ‘set.get’?
It wouldn't take any input.
That is even less obvious. I would expect a parameter-less ‘set.get’ to get the set. Not terribly useful, but the name and function signature doesn't suggest anything else.
"get" is such a generic term that I don't believe that is a problem.
The problem above is made less problematic by the fact that the function signature (e.g. ‘foo_dict.get(key)’) clarifies the answer to the question “get what?”. Whereas ‘foo_set.get()’ doesn't communicate much at all to the reader.
If we want a method that gets one item from a set, perhaps the name can make it clearer: name it ‘set.getitem’. But which item should it get? The ‘__getitem__’ special method of lists and dictionaries requires an index or key as parameter.