Bag

A bag (also known as a multi-set) is a unordered collection of objects, similar to a hash table, where each object has a count number, which represents the number of times it exists in the bag.

Bag('foo', 'bar', 'baz')

Operations

The Bag class supports all the set operators, such as intersection, difference, symmetric difference, union and concatenation.

var A = Bag('foo', 'bar', 'baz', 'foo')
var B = Bag('bar', 'foo', 'qux')

# Count how many times is 'foo' present in the bag A
say A.count('foo')  #=> 2

# Intersection
say (A & B)         #=> Bag("foo", "bar")

# Union
say (A | B)         #=> Bag("qux", "bar", "baz", "foo", "foo")

# Difference
say (A - B)         #=> Bag("baz", "foo")
say (B - A)         #=> Bag("qux")

# Symmetric difference
say (A ^ B)         #=> Bag("foo", "qux", "baz")

# Concatenation
say (A + B)         #=> Bag("foo", "foo", "foo", "bar", "bar", "baz", "qux")

Updating the bag

The methods bag.add_pair(obj, count) and bag.update_pair(obj, count) can be used for efficiently updating a bag in-place.

var A = Bag('foo', 'foo', 'bar')

# Add 'bar' with count=2
A.add_pair('baz', 2)

say A   #=> Bag("baz", "baz", "bar", "foo", "foo")

# Update the count of 'foo'
A.update_pair('foo', 1)

say A   #=> Bag("baz", "baz", "bar", "foo")

Furthermore, the method bag.delete(obj) can be used for removing one occurrence of object obj from the bag, while the .delete_all(obj) can be used for removing all the occurrences of obj from the bag.