[Python-Dev] Retrieve an arbitrary element from a set without removing it (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Oct 24 08:22:25 CEST 2009

Ben Finney writes:

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> writes:

"get" is such a generic term that I don't believe that is a problem.

The problem above is made less problematic by the fact that the function signature (e.g. 'foo_dict.get(key)') clarifies the answer to the question "get what?". Whereas 'foo_set.get()' doesn't communicate much at all to the reader.

I agree.

This is precisely why a couple of months ago people were proposing names like ".getany()" for this API.

The problem brought up then was that pretty clearly people would then do things like

x = foo.getany()
y = foo.getany()

expecting x and y to be different (ie, interpreting "any" as "random"). Pretty soon there was a whole family of proposals for such methods: .getfirst(), .getlast(), .getrandom(), .getonly(), ....

I think it would be better to document the various ways of doing this, and let each program define its own oneliner for the MySet.get() that makes idiomatic sense in its use case.

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