Include Set Operations (Union, Intersection, etc.)

[dthor]

LabVIEW should ship with a Set Operations palette item, including the common operations such as Union, Intersection, Complement, and Cartesian Product, as well as more advanced operations that I don't know about. These operations would act on 1D arrays of almost anything. Floating point numbers and those would have to have some kind of "error in value" input that defaults to the machine epsilon or equality checking. Output would be a 1D array on the input datatype with the values, and perhaps an output for matched indices.

Yes, these are quite easy to make yourself (loop+search), but I think that it would be beneficial for the community for NI to provide it. The VIs found at http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/3929  are... Interesting, to say the least. NI might be able to provide better performance, too.

[X.]

You could also use the OpenG VIs (which are polymorphic):

as in:

We are missing the cartesian product, but I am not sure what you may want to use it for PRACTICALLY?

[dthor]

I do use those functions (gotta love OpenG), but not all developers do. Also, and this is a minor inconvienence, after peforming the operation you need to coerce back to the original data type.

Other set operations can be done with OpenG, but require more code. For example, A ⊆ B ? (is A a subset of B?) is pretty easy to do, but Power Set(A) will be more complicated.

In addition, the well-defined sets (Primes, Complex, the Null set, et cetera) could be added as constants.

I just think it would be useful to have dedicated set theory operations in LabVIEW.

[X.]

I guess you're right. I am just not using set operations myself (not that I can remember at least).

[Darren]

Available in LabVIEW 2019 and later with VIs and functions in the Collections > Set palette.