[Python-3000] Set literals - another try (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Aug 9 20:36:32 CEST 2006

On 8/8/06, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:

Part 1: The concrete proposal part.

I noticed that a lot of folks seemed to like the idea of making the empty set resemble the greek letter Phi, using a combination of parentheses and the vertical bar or forward slash character. So lets expand on this: slice Phi in half and say that (| and |) are delimiters for a set literal, as follows: (|) # Empty set (|a|) # Set with 1 item (|a,b|) # Set with 2 items The advantage of this proposal is that it maintains visual consistency between the 0, 1, and N element cases.

-1.

This attempts to solve the lack of an empty set literal in the current best proposal, which is set(), {1}, {1, 2}, {1, 2, 3} etc. But it does so at the tremendous cost of inventing new unfamiliar brackets.

Part 2: The idle speculation part, not to be considered as a actual proposal. [...] The syntax that comes to mind is something like this:

a = b|c

This would be ambiguous since b|c also means set union.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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