Sets are collections of elements with no duplicate elements.
The data representing a set as used by this module is to be regarded as opaque by other modules. In abstract terms, the representation is a composite type of existing Erlang terms. See note on data types. Any code assuming knowledge of the format is running on thin ice.
This module provides the same interface as the ordsets(3) module but with an undefined representation. One difference is that while this module considers two elements as different if they do not match (=:=), ordsets considers two elements as different if and only if they do not compare equal (==).
Erlang/OTP 24.0 introduced a new internal representation for sets which is more performant. Developers can use this new representation by passing the {version, 2} flag to new/1 and from_list/2, such as sets:new([{version, 2}]). This new representation will become the default in future Erlang/OTP versions. Functions that work on two sets, such as union/2 and similar, will work with sets of different versions. In such cases, there is no guarantee about the version of the returned set. Explicit conversion from the old version to the new one can be done with sets:from_list(sets:to_list(Old), [{version,2}]).