set using alternative hash function?

[Austin Bingham]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Anthony Tolle <anthony.tolle at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wrote a quick subclass of set that does something similar, but uses
> just one function for the object uniqueness:
>
> class MySet(set):
>    def __init__(self, iterable = (), idfunc = lambda x: x):
>        self.idfunc = idfunc
>        self.ids = set()
>        for item in iterable:
>            self.add(item)
>
>    def add(self, item):
>        id = self.idfunc(item)
>        if id not in self.ids:
>            self.ids.add(id)
>            set.add(self, item)

Yes, what you've got there provides the interface of what I want. And
no doubt we could concoct countless ways to implement some version of
this. However, if set itself accepted an alternate hash function, then
I could do it with no extra overhead. Consider your implementation: it
requires an extra set (extra space) and an extra lookup on many
operations (extra time.) My original hope was to not have to do that.

Austin