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March 6, 2019
2:05 a.m.
On Mar 5, 2019, at 2:13 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Rhodri James wrote:
I have to go and look in the documentation because I expect the union operator to be '+'.
Anyone raised on Pascal is likely to find + and * more natural. Pascal doesn't have bitwise operators, so it re-uses + and * for set operations. I like the economy of this arrangement -- it's not as if there's any other obvious meaning that + and * could have for sets.
The language SETL (the language of sets) also uses + and * for set operations.¹ For us though, the decision to use | and & are set in stone. The time for debating the decision was 19 years ago.² Raymond ¹ https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6805 ² https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0218/