[New Concept Exercise] : sets

[BethanyG]

This issue describes how to implement the sets concept exercise for the Python track. This will be closed by #2485

Getting started

Please please please read the docs before starting. Posting PRs without reading these docs will be a lot more frustrating for you during the review cycle, and exhaust Exercism's maintainers' time. So, before diving into the implementation, please read up on the following documents:

• The features of v3.
• Rationale for v3.
• What are concept exercise and how they are structured?

Please also watch the following video:

• The Anatomy of a Concept Exercise.

Goal

The goal of this exercise is to teach the basics of the set (set type) in Python.

Learning objectives

• understand that a set is an unordered collection of distinct hashable objects
• create a set via constructor (set()) and literal ({})
• de-dupe a list of elements by converting a sequence type such as a list to a set type
• check for a membership of an element in a given set via in
• set comparison functions and set comparison operators (=<, >=, issubset(), issuperset(), etc.)
• additional set operators (union, intersection, difference, and symmetric_difference)
• add values to a given set via add()
• remove values from a given set via discard()
• iterate through a given set by using for item in set

Out of scope

• frozenset()
• clear() to delete all elements of a set
• check the length of a given set via len()
• remove as opposed to discard (remove tosses a keyerror if the element is not present)
• all forms/variants of update()
• remove (and use) a value from a given set via pop()
• make shallow copy(s) of a given set via copy()
• using additional builtins such as sorted(), min(), or map() with a set
• set comprehensions

Concepts

• sets
• hashable objects
• set comparisons
• set operations

Prerequisites

• basics
• booleans
• comparisons
• dicts
• lists
• loops

Resources to refer to

• Set Types (Python Official Docs)
• Hashable (Python Official Docs Glossary)
• immutable (Python Official Docs Glossary)

Hints

Hints should link to the Sets section of the Python docs tutorial: Sets

After

After, the student can explore comprehension syntax, although it will be taught in separate exercises. This would also be a good time to explore set comparisons via function &/or operator, or experimenting with the issuperset() & issubset() functions.

Representer

No changes required.

Analyzer

No changes required.

Implementing

Tests should be written using unittest.TestCase, and the test file named dicts_basic_test.py.

Help

If you have any questions while implementing the exercise, please post the questions as comments in this issue.

Edits

• edited for updated naming by @yawpitch

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