The mechanics do matter because it's fundamentally a mechanical device.

What about it involves thinking of elements as bits and sets as whole numbers? I'm not seeing it. Everything you just described is just a physical representation of sets and operations on sets. I don't see any step where elements are mapped to powers of 2 and added up (unless you for some reason insist on thinking that way of aggregating elements into a set), nor any step where a number is broken into bits (again, unless you for some reason insist on thinking that way of breaking a set into its elements).

> What about it involves thinking of elements as bits and sets as whole numbers?

I said bitwise arithmetic, not binary numbers. :)

> Everything you just described is just a physical representation of sets and operations on sets.

Sure, and how is the set represented and its operations implemented? In the Oracle, each set is represented by a bitmask with a bit position for each element in the set. Set operations are implemented as bitwise operations on those bitmasks.

I’m more used to bits than sets, so it worked for me. People have different backgrounds.