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Trying to index into a set
🐛 Fix the bug Topic: sets Difficulty: hard Premium
What this problem practises
Sets are unordered containers that drop duplicates on insertion. Membership tests are fast, insertion order is not preserved, and {} builds an empty dict — not an empty set.
This is a fix-the-bug problem: a short program is given in its broken state, and the task is to repair the code so it produces the required output. The interactive editor runs your fixed version in the browser and checks it for you — no setup, no local interpreter.
Difficulty: hard — the naive reading is wrong, and the answer depends on tracking state precisely through the snippet.
The challenge
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Keep going
- Python debugging guide — a systematic method for finding bugs like this one fast.
- Browse every sets problem in this topic.
- Common Python errors and what they actually mean, plus the Python glossary for any term used on this page.