Paul Rubin, 15.03.2011 09:00:
Ian Kelly writes:
I would think that you can sort them with key as long as none of the
sequences are equal (which would result in an infinite loop using
either method). Why not this?
Yes you can do something like that, but look how ugly it is compared
with using cmp.
I would argue that it's a rare use case, though. In most cases, memory
doesn't really matter, and the overhead of a decorated sort is acceptable.
In some cases, where space matters, an external sort is a better choice or
even the only thing that will work, so all that's left are the cases where
speed really needs to be traded for space *and* an external sort is not
applicable, and those where things can be expressed more easily using cmp
than using a key. For the latter, there's support in the standard library,
as Steven pointed out. Now, the question that remains is: are the few
remaining cases worth being supported directly, thus complicating the
internal source code of the Python runtime?
Stefan
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