In mathematical notation, intersection is defined as:
And using Venn diagram:
intersection()
accepts set-like objects as the other
parameter. It requires this
to be an actual Set
instance, because it directly retrieves the underlying data stored in this
without invoking any user code. Then, its behavior depends on the sizes of this
and other
:
- If there are more elements in
this
than other.size
, then it iterates over other
by calling its keys()
method, and constructs a new set with all elements produced that are also present in this
. - Otherwise, it iterates over the elements in
this
, and constructs a new set with all elements e
in this
that cause other.has(e)
to return a truthy value.
Because of this implementation, the efficiency of intersection()
mostly depends on the size of the smaller set between this
and other
(assuming sets can be accessed in sublinear time). The order of elements in the returned set is the same as that of the smaller of this
and other
.