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

Greg Wilson gvwilson at cs.utoronto.ca
Wed Feb 1 22:48:23 CET 2006

The PEP records that Tim argued for leaving the extra parentheses. What would you do with {'title'} -- create a four element set consisting of letters or a single element set consisting of a string?

This is a moderately-fertile source of bugs for newcomers: judging from the number of students who come into my office with code that they think ought to work, but doesn't, most people believe that:

set(1, 2, 3)

is "right". I believe curly-brace notation would eliminate this problem.

Thanks, Greg

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list