Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> writes: > On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:04:12 am Terry Reedy wrote: > > fwiw, I think the use case for this is sufficiently rare that it > > does not need a separate method just for this purpose. > > And yet it keeps coming up, again and again... obviously people using > sets in code think it has a use-case.
The desire for this may be obvious, but what seems to be lacking is One Obvious Way to Do It. I agree that ‘for x in foo_set: break’ is not an Obvious Way. > The lack of get() in sets and frozensets is sounding more and more to > me like the victory of purity over practicality. What would be the input to ‘set.get’? If it's the value, that makes it rather non-obvious; if I already know about ‘dict.get’ which takes the key, I'm not going to be thinking about the ‘get’ method if I don't have a key to feed it. Once I learn it, I'm going to forget it easily, because it's inconsistent with ‘dict.get’. So I don't think that meets the “obvious way” criterion. By analogy with ‘list.pop’, the method that takes the “top” item off the “stack”, I would expect to see ‘list.peek’ and ‘set.peek’, to see the item without altering the container. -- \ “Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind | `\ the human shield of their believers' feelings.” —Richard | _o__) Stallman | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com