[Python-Dev] syntactic support for sets (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Feb 3 20:02:16 CET 2006

Donovan Baarda wrote:

Before set() the standard way to do them was to use dicts with None Values... to me the "{1,2,3}" syntax would have been a logical extension of the "a set is a dict with no values, only keys" mindset. I don't know why it wasn't done this way in the first place, though I missed the arguments where it was rejected.

There might be many reasons; one obvious reason is that you can't spell the empty set that way.

Frozensets are to sets what tuples are to lists. It would be nice if there was another type of bracket that could be used for frozenset... something like ':1,2,3:'... yuk... I dunno.

Readability counts.

Regards, Martin

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