Python sets, frozensets, and literals

Posted Jan 21, 2022 3:38 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Python sets, frozensets, and literals by excors
Parent article: Python sets, frozensets, and literals

> I don't know how you'd define it in a way that doesn't become trivial and useless, but doesn't become so complicated that it stops being a helpful approximation and is no better than just counting the exact number of computational steps.

If you're willing to turn all your limits inside-out, you can probably do this in the 2-adic integers. But then you have to deal with a variety of oddities, such as the fact that the sequence of successive powers of two converges to zero under the 2-adic metric (which is certainly not the case in the regular integers!) - informally, you can think of this as indicating that very large powers of two can only be distinguished from zero using a correspondingly large (wide) integer type, and in the limit, it becomes impossible to distinguish them altogether, and so the 2-adic metric says the limit of the sequence is zero.