LFE Friday - ordsets:subtract/2

This week's LFE Friday was translated with permission from the Erlang Thursday series by Steven Proctor. This week's translator: Robert Virding.

Today's LFE Friday comes from a sunny Gotland and is on ordsets:subtract/2.

ordsets:subtract/2 takes two ordered sets as its arguments, and returns a ordered set containing the items of the first ordered set that are not in the second ordered set.

> (set set-1 (ordsets:from_list '(5 4 3 2 1)))
(1 2 3 4 5)
> (set set-2 (ordsets:from_list '(1 1 2 3 5 8 13)))
(1 2 3 5 8 13)
> (set set-3 (ordsets:from_list '(2 -2 4 -4 16 -16)))
(-16 -4 -2 2 4 16)
> (set empty-set (ordsets:new))
()
> (ordsets:subtract set-1 set-2)
(4)
> (ordsets:subtract set-1 empty-set)
(1 2 3 4 5)
> (ordsets:subtract set-2 empty-set)
(1 2 3 5 8 13)
> (ordsets:subtract empty-set set-1)
()
> (ordsets:subtract set-2 set-3)
(1 3 5 8 13)

And note that ordsets:subtract/2 is not commutative, unlike ordsets:union/2 or ordsets:intersection/2.

> (ordsets:subtract set-1 set-3)
(1 3 5)
> (ordsets:subtract set-3 set-1)
(-16 -4 -2 16)

And again, your friendly reminder if you haven't been following along, just because Ordered Sets in LFE are represented as a List, doesn't mean that Lists are Ordered Sets.

-Proctor, Robert