On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 08:53:53PM -0400, Todd wrote:

[I wrote this]
> > I would expect %w{ ... } to return a set, not a list:
> >
> >     %w[ ... ]  # list
> >     %w{ ... ]  # set
> >     %w( ... )  # tuple
> >

[Todd replied]
> This is growing into an entire new group of constructors for a very, very
> limited number of operations that have been privileged for some reason.

Sure. That's what syntactic sugar is: privileging one particular thing
over another. That's why, for example, we privilage the idiom:

    import spam
    eggs = spam.eggs

by giving it special syntax, but not

    class Spam: ...
    spam = Spam(args)
    del Spam

Some things are privileged. We privilage for-loops as comprehensions,
but not while-loop; we privilage getting a bunch of indexes in a
sequence as a slice ``sequence[start:end]`` but not getting a bunch of
items from a dict. Not everything can be syntactic sugar; but that
doesn't mean nothing should be syntactic sugar.