[Python-Dev] One obvious way to do interning [Was: Retrieve an arbitrary element from a set without removing it] (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Oct 26 20:20:55 CET 2009

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

Changing the subject to reflect branched discussion and forwarding to python-ideas where it probably belongs.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote: Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

Here is an alternative idea on how storing interned objects in a set can be supported. Currently set.add method returns None and has no effect when set already has an object equal to the one being added. I propose to consider changing that behavior to make set.add return the added object or the set member that is equal to the object being added. It is unlikely that many programs rely on the return value being None (with doctests being a probable exception), so adding this feature is unlikely to cause much grief. I had exactly the same idea, but did not post because it violates the general rule that mutators return None. Is there such a rule? What about set/dict pop?

The rule perhaps should be restated as 'Collection mutators return None or possible an item but not the collection.'

On the other hand, the returned value here would not be the mutated collection, so no chaining is possible.

And 'add' is clearly intended to change something.

Is this an argument for or against the proposal?

Mildly for.

On the other hand, frozensets do not have an add method. However, PySetAdd "works with frozenset instances (like PyTupleSetItem() it can be used to fill-in the values of brand new frozensets before they are exposed to other code). " <http://docs.python.org/3.1/c-api/set.html#PySetAdd> I will experiment with changing PySetAdd to see how much it would break and whether it will be helpful in implementing set-based interning of python strings.

Terry Jan Reedy

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