On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 08:48:49PM -0700, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
I think it is highly unlikely that people will be frightened off from overloading @ by the name. If people happily use __lt__ for subset checking, which is *nothing* like less-than,
Actually, no. <, or "less than", is the exact way it's spelled for any partial order, and subset relations are probably the most famous non-numeric example of a partial order.
I will accept that subsets are an example of partial order and so I was wrong to say that that it has nothing to do with __lt__ and __gt__. But I disagree that < is the usual symbol for subset. Neither Wikipedia nor Wolfram Mathworld mention it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Subset.html I was taught to use symbols ⊂ and ⊆ for proper subset and subset-or- equal. I've also seen ⊊ and ⊂ used instead. But prior to Python, I've never seen < used. If it's used in mathematics, it's a niche use. -- Steven