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del and sets proposal

bearophileHUGS at lycos.com bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Fri Oct 3 06:37:03 EDT 2008 
Steven D'Aprano:
> Personally, I'd rather see dictionaries grow methods like
> symmetric_difference, union, etc. than worry about whether you use del or
> remove to remove elements from a set.

I have functions for all those operations, so I think they can be
useful, but in practice I don't use them often. I think it's a matter
of keeping data structures separated in the mind.

Another problem is that with those operations you have to find a way
to manage values too, are they part of the uniqueness, etc? So there
can be different semantics of a single operation, and this may lead to
people that have a wrong image model of the purpose of some of those
methods.

Bye,
bearophile
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