Re: [Axiom-developer] Set Any and SXHASH

[Waldek Hebisch]

> In http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/347BugInMapSet
> 
> 'oklhazi' reported that "map confuses sets" and gives
> the example
> 
>   A:=set [-2,-1,0]
>   B:=set [0,1,4]
>   C:=map(x +-> x^2,A)
>   test(C=B)
> 
> where the map operation produces a "Set" C with the same
> elements as B but which is not equal to B, thus violating
> a major axiom of set theory.
> 
> The documentation for Set
> 
> http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/axiom--test--1/src/algebra/SetsSpad
> 
> says, (in part):
> 
> ++ In our implementation, \Language{} maintains the entries
> ++ in sorted order.  Specifically, the parts function returns
> ++ the entries as a list in ascending order and the extract
> ++ operation returns the maximum entry.
> 
> but the example shows that this is not true even if the Set
> is composed of elements from a domain which has OrderedSet.
> In the #347 I proposed a simple patch to correct this
> behaviour but it is easy to show that it still fails if the
> element domain is not an OrderedSet.
>

I would say that sorting elements of Set is a design bug.
Namely, without any support form domain specific code it is
hard to define linear order.  AFAICS in Axiom only domains
which have OrderedSet are eqipped with linear order.
 
> So my question for Axiom Developers and Lisp aficionados is
> what is your opinion of the use of SXHASH? How well does SXHASH
> behave in GCL? What might be a reasonable alternative for
> defining a total ordering on the elements of a Set given the
> possibility of the type 'Set Any'?
>

Hashing allows reasonably efficient implementation of set
operations.
 
-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden