Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old...@gmail.com> wrote: > This make a lot more sense to us, and follows the convention from > other languages. It would also mean chaining methods to manipulate > lists would be easier: > >>>> x = [2,1,3] >>>> print x.sort()[0] > 3 >>>> print x > [2,1,3]
You already have a way to do what you want: >>> x = [2,1,3] >>> print sorted(x)[0] 3 >>> print x [2,1,3] as a bonus you can use 'sorted' to sort any sequence including generators or tuples, but the result will always be a list: if it was a list method then you would have to convert the sequence to a list first. The main reason why you need both lists and tuples is that because a tuple of immutable objects is itself immutable you can use it as a dictionary key. You can't use a list as a dictionary key because if something were to mutate a key the dictionary structure would behave very strangely indeed. The types 'set' and 'frozenset' both exist for the same reason. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
