On 12/8/2010 1:47 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:58:03 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
Carl Banks<pavlovevide...@gmail.com> writes:
On Dec 6, 4:17 pm, Steven D'Aprano<steve
+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
Nevertheless, I agree that in hindsight, the ability to sort such
lists is not as important as the consistency of comparisons.
I think that feeling the need to sort non-homogenous lists is
indicative of bad design.
It can also be indicative of code written for a Python that doesn't have
sets.
Or a list that contains unhashable objects.
If you can't hash it, and it doesn't have some definition of
comparison associated with the object, you probably can't order
it properly, either.
"<" can't be some random function. For sorting to work,
a < b and b < c implies a < c
must hold.
John Nagle
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