PEP 218 Re: ANN: set-0.1 module available

[Steve Holden]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote ...
>
> > Language design and implementation is always a balancing act: you want
> > abstract, flexible and general features but you want them to be
> > realistically
> > implementable by normal humans in a finite amount of time. Where to
> > draw the
> > line is always a decision that involves as much gut and intuition as
> > it does
> > 'science'. So far I think the python team has done an admirable job of
> > finding a great balance. IMHO for sets, making them immutable would
> > fall too
> > far in the direction of 'practicality' and lose too much in the
> > 'flexibility
> > and power of abstraction' department. But again, that's my opinion.
>
> Of course; we're just disagreeing on where that line should be drawn in
> this case.
>
> What would, then, be a reasonable implementation of a set (with mutable
> objects) in Python?  The immutable keys in Python dictionaries already
> sets a precedent for this effort being on the far side of practicality.
>

Well, in my case I'm disagreeing that there ought to be a line at all. If we
can have lists and tuples, I don't see any reason why we couldn't have two
flavours of set as well.

regards
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Steve Holden                                 http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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