Converting a list to a set changes element order

Question

Recently I noticed that when I am converting a list to set the order of elements is changed and is sorted by character.

Consider this examp

Answer 1

It's interesting that people always use 'real world problem' to make joke on the definition in theoretical science.

If set has order, you first need to figure out the following problems. If your list has duplicate elements, what should the order be when you turn it into a set? What is the order if we union two sets? What is the order if we intersect two sets with different order on the same elements?

Plus, set is much faster in searching for a particular key which is very good in sets operation (and that's why you need a set, but not list).

If you really care about the index, just keep it as a list. If you still want to do set operation on the elements in many lists, the simplest way is creating a dictionary for each list with the same keys in the set along with a value of list containing all the index of the key in the original list.

def indx_dic(l):
    dic = {}
    for i in range(len(l)):
        if l[i] in dic:
            dic.get(l[i]).append(i)
        else:
            dic[l[i]] = [i]
    return(dic)

a = [1,2,3,4,5,1,3,2]
set_a  = set(a)
dic_a = indx_dic(a)

print(dic_a)
# {1: [0, 5], 2: [1, 7], 3: [2, 6], 4: [3], 5: [4]}
print(set_a)
# {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}