Sergey B Kirpichev added the comment: On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 03:25:19PM +0000, Benjamin Peterson wrote: > So, basically you need a base case for recursion? What's wrong with > explicitly writing that out?
Because it's complex (and costly). This is not a trivial test and I don't see reasons to fix that is not broken. And it will be difficult to explain for readers: remember, I need this exceptional case only in the world with a strange Python's convention (Python try to sort a list when it doesn't make sense). Mathematical algorithm is not broken - programming language is. Here is C: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/msort.c;#l45 Here is Ruby: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/array.c#L2454 > It's practical if you have a broken key function and test it with a one > element list. It's silly to test key function on a single-element list *only*. > > BTW, why this issue was closed? > > 3 of us agreed this doesn't seem like a suitable change. And 1 seems to be ok with patch. Is this just a question of number of votes? At least, please consider this as a documentation issue. That ... feature may be obvious for a Python developer, but not for mathematician (as well as ordinary Python user). When key function value has no sense at all - it's not clear from the documentation, that the key function will be called. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue24075> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
