On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Depending on what exactly you need, it's probably worth just using a >>> dict. In what ways do you need it to function as a list? You can >>> always iterate over sorted(some_dict.keys()) if you need to run >>> through them in order. >> >> FWIW, sorting inside a loop is rarely a good idea, unless your lists >> are pretty small. > > What do you mean by "sorting inside a loop"? I was thinking of this: > > for key in sorted(some_dict.keys()): > # blah blah > > which will sort once and then iterate over it.
That is fine, sorting once at then end of a script is a good use of sorted(some_dict.keys()). However, it probably should be pointed out that this, while similar, is not so good: for thing in range(n): for key in sorted(some_dict.keys()): do_something(thing, key) ...because it's sorting n times. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list