The main difference between sets and other data structures lies in the fact that only sets can’t contain repeated elements.
To elaborate on the provided options:
- Only sets are immutable: This is not true; sets can be mutable (like Python's
set
), and there are immutable versions of sets (like Python'sfrozenset
). - Only sets are mutable: This is also not true; many other data structures like lists, dictionaries, and arrays are mutable too.
- Only sets can’t contain repeated elements: This is the correct statement. Sets inherently do not allow duplicates.
- Only sets are indexed beginning at zero: This is false; sets are unordered collections and do not support indexing like lists or arrays.
Thus, the distinguishing feature of sets is their properties regarding uniqueness of elements.