very Very VERY dumb Question About The new Set( ) 's

[John Roth]

"Raymond Arthur St. Marie II of III " <rastm2 at aol.commorespam> wrote in
message news:20030723144732.13232.00000523 at mb-m10.aol.com...
> very Very VERY dumb ? about the new Set( ) 's
>
> Please be kind and read this like you know I've been up 33-34 hours
reading
> PEP's but...
>
> Doc\ref 2.6 Delimiters show's three unused characters "@ $ ?".
> @ sort of looks like and sort of sounds like a set an
> $  well sort of obvious.
> I can imagine that the $ would be confused for money and @ is ugly.
>
> You folks have prob'ly been all over this.
> Even thou I've been using Python since 1.4, I only joined the
comp.lang.python
> a couple weeks ago so I don't know the flame wars over the Set
implimentation.
>
> Ray St. Marie --- Afraid to sign his name to this one
> Rastm2 at aol.bomB

Is your question why they didn't add new operators for the set
operators, rather than overloading the existing ones?

There are two factors. One is that Guido is holding those three
characters back for some time when we *really* need them. Sets
are still somewhat experimental - if they take off like wildfire they
may migrate into the core. Adding operator symbols for something
that's in  a library doesn't seem like a real good idea.

The other issue is that those three characters have no particular
relationship to sets, while the Unicode standard contains the
actual set operator symbols used in mathematics. When the source
script finally becomes Unicode will be the time to talk about
expanding the operator set. I'd be very surprised if it happens
before 3.0, and very surprised if it isn't one of the major
features in that same rather vague 3.0 release.

On the other hand, I'm hoping (without much expectation)
that we decide that 2.3 will be followed by 3.0. I've got a
little list... (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan.)

John Roth