🚀 go-pugleaf

How big should a set be?

Wirth created the idea of a bitset because it would be easy to implement
a very efficient way to do sets the size of the computer's word.  This
means sets are likely to be 8, 16 or 32 bits, possibly other sizes,
depending on the implementation.

Bruce MacLennan in his book, Principles of Programming Languages presents
an idea which I quite agree with.  "The only reasonable numbers are zero,
one, and infinity."

Since zero and one are not very usefull numbers when you're dealing with
sets ( they're rather special case sets ), I would propose a that the limit
be infinity.  The actual limit would be dependant on the available memory
for storing the set, but it could be a very large number.  Since the type
of each set is known, the compiler could determine how much memory is
required to store the set.  Now, we have the ability to say something
like SET OF CARDINAL, since most implementations have cardinal values of
0 .. 65535.  If you were to store one member per bit, the entire set
could be represented in 8k {of memory, assuming 8 bit bytes.  This is a
reasonable size block of memory to consider even on older 8 bit machines.

                                                     Tom Ruby
                                                  MSRS002@ECNCDC