PEP 218 Re: ANN: set-0.1 module available

[Erik Max Francis]

Fernando Pérez 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.

-- 
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