Set literals

[George Sakkis]

How about overloading curly braces for set literals, as in

aSet = {1,2,3}

- It is the standard mathematic set notation.
- There is no ambiguity or backwards compatibility problem.
- Sets and dicts are in many respects similar data structures, so why not share the same delimiter ?

*ducks*

[George Sakkis]

> - There is no ambiguity or backwards compatibility problem.

....at least if it wasn't for the empty set.. hmm...

[simon]

+1 from me.

The other possible meaning for {1,2,3} would be {1:None,2:None,3:None},
but that is usually meant to be a set anyway (done with a dict).

So what is this: {1:2, 3, 4 } (apart from "nearly useless") ?

hmmm, thinking a bit more about this, it seems
you can build a set from a dict's keys, but not the other
way around. Is this odd, or what ?

a = set({1:0,2:0,3:0})
a set([1, 2, 3])
dict(a)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: cannot convert dictionary update sequence element #0 to a
sequence

Simon.

[George Sakkis]

si***@arrowtheory.com> wrote:

+1 from me.

The other possible meaning for {1,2,3} would be {1:None,2:None,3:None},
but that is usually meant to be a set anyway (done with a dict).

So what is this: {1:2, 3, 4 } (apart from "nearly useless") ?
Syntax error; you'll have to decide whether you want a set or a dict.
hmmm, thinking a bit more about this, it seems
you can build a set from a dict's keys, but not the other
way around. Is this odd, or what ?

a = set({1:0,2:0,3:0})
a set([1, 2, 3])
dict(a) Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: cannot convert dictionary update sequence element #0 to a
sequence

Simon.

Nothing odd here. The set constructor takes an iterable, and dict.__iter__ iterates through the
dict's keys, so the set a in your example doesn't know anything about the dict's values. You can go
back and forth a set and a dict if you store the dict's items instead:

a = set({1:0,2:0,3:0}.iteritems())
a set([(1,0), (2,0), (3,0)]) dict(a)

{1:0, 2:0, 3:0}

Regards,
George