[Raymond Hettinger] > Here are a few thoughts on list.sort() for those who are interested:
After one more reading of Xah Lee's posts on the documentation for sort, here are couple more thoughts: * The reason that list.sort() allows None for the cmp parameter is not so that you can write list.sort(None). It was put there to make it easier for people writing function definitions where the cmp function is a possible argument: def sort_and_chop(seq, maxlen, cmp=None): s = seq[:] s.sort(cmp) # needs to accept None as a possible argument return s[:maxlen] * The reason for implementing the key= parameter had nothing to do with limitations of Python's compiler. Instead, it was inspired by the decorate-sort-undecorate pattern. Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list