del and sets proposal

[George Sakkis]

On Oct 2, 6:20 pm, Larry Bates <larry.ba... at vitalEsafe.com> wrote:

> You can do the following:
>
> a = [1,2,3,4,5]
> del a[0]
>
> and
>
> a = {1:'1', 2: '2', 3: '3', 4:'4', 5:'5'}
> del a[1]
>
> why doesn't it work the same for sets (particularly since sets are based on a
> dictionary)?
>
> a = set([1,2,3,4,5])
> del a[1]
>
> Yes I know that sets have a remove method (like lists), but since dictionaries
> don't have a remove method, shouldn't sets behave like more like dictionaries
> and less like lists?  IMHO del for sets is quite intuitive.  I guess it is too
> late to change now.

Funny, I would welcome a change in the opposite direction: drop
completely the "del a[i]" syntax from the language and use an explicit
(non-special) method name, e.g. a.delete(i) or a.remove(i). Having
some functionality exposed through methods and some through function
builtins (e.g. len()) is more than enough; having a third way through
the del statement is unnecessarily perl-ish.

George