> I'm not sure a heap will help much, and at least to me, > doesn't improve readability.
nlargest() should save quite a few comparisons and run much faster than sorted(). Not sure what the readability issue is. The phrase "nlargest(2, iterable)" does exactly what it says, finds the 2 largest elements from an iterable. That makes the programmer's intent more clear than the slower, but semanticly equivalent form: sorted(iterable)[:2]. The running time for your algorithm can be very long, depending on the inputs. Do you need an exact answer or can you approximate it with sampling random combinations (i.e. choose the best two scores out of 10000 samples). Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
