[Python-Dev] Retrieve an arbitrary element from a setwithoutremoving it (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Fri Oct 30 16:46:01 CET 2009

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

So you want to introduce additional, hidden state to sets? (to make sure that successive invocations return different values) If you can think of any other way to efficiently cycle over the elements in a set, I'm all for it :)

for x in itertools.cycle(s):

this is an infinite loop

Having a pick() or get() method that returns an arbitrary member of a set makes sense to me. Having any state on the set that guarantees successive calls to get will return different values feels wrong - creating an object with that extra state is what iter(s) is for.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list