What is the Set object?

The Set object lets you store unique values of any type, whether primitive values or object references.

Set objects are collections of values. You can iterate through the elements of a set in insertion order. A value in the Set may only occur once; it is unique in the Set’s collection.

You can create a set by using theSet() constructor, or by initializing it with an array of elements (see below).

The following example creates a new Set object with an array of numbers:

var mySet = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4]);

Why does the Set object not support indexing?

One of the key differences between a Set and a List is that a Set is not ordered, while a List is. This means that you cannot index into a Set the way you can with a List.

If you need to index into a Set, you can first convert it to a List:

my_set = set([1, 2, 3])
my_list = list(my_set)
my_list[1]
2

What are some of the workarounds for this limitation?

A set object does not support indexing, but there are a number of ways to work around this limitation. One common approach is to convert the set to a list, which does support indexing.

Another approach is to use the built-in sorted() function, which returns a new list containing the elements of the set in sorted order. Once you have a sorted list, you can use the index() method to find the position of any element.

Finally, you can also use the bisect module from the standard library, which provides a bisect() function that works with any type of sequence.

What are some of the benefits of using the Set object?

The Set object lets you store unique values of any type, whether primitive values or object references.

Sets are useful for many different applications, such as keeping track of unique visitors to a website, removing duplicate entries from phone books or databases, or maintaining lists of items such as ingredients in a recipe or anthologies of literary works.