Steven D'Aprano <steve <at> pearwood.info> writes:
If you can think of any other way to efficiently cycle over the elements in a set, I'm all for it :)
How about "for x in s"? Or if you want to cycle:
s = set('abc') it = itertools.cycle(s) next(it) 'a' next(it) 'c' next(it) 'b' next(it) 'a'
Or if you don't want the overhead of itertools.cycle() keeping a copy of the set's elements:
s = set('abc') it = itertools.chain.from_iterable(itertools.cycle([s])) next(it) 'a' next(it) 'c' next(it) 'b' next(it) 'a' next(it) 'c' next(it) 'b'
I can't say I've seen one in any other languages, but Wikipedia lists "pick" as a fundamental set operation:
pick(S): returns an arbitrary element of S.
Well, it's an arbitrary element. It isn't specified that it will try to return different results in a row to satisfy the developer's aesthetical preferences...
This page claims that Icon has an operator that returns a random element of a set:
? set( [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] )
random != arbitrary != weak-guaranteedly distinct