On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:06:14 -0800, walterbyrd wrote:
> On Nov 8, 7:44 pm, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Define your own ordering if you need to sort incomparable types.
>
> If you starting new, I suppose you can always work around this new
> enhancement. But, couldn't this cause a lot of backward compatibility
> issues?
Which is why the change has only been introduced into Python 3, and not
Python 2.x.
> Also, I thought that part of the python philosophy was to allow any sort
> of object in a list, and to allow the same methods to work with whatever
> was in list.
You wouldn't expect this to work would you?
sum( [1, 2, None, "a string", {'x': 5}, []] )
You can only sum objects which are compatible. You can only sort objects
which define an order: you can't sort lists containing complex numbers
because "greater than" and "less than" aren't defined for complex
numbers, and in Python 3 you will no longer be able to order mixed
objects unless they are intrinsically comparable (e.g. floats and ints),
unless you define your own order.
--
Steven
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