On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Shubham Tomar <tomarshubha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lets say I have a function poker(hands) that takes a list of hands and > returns the highest ranking hand, and another function hand_rank(hand) that > takes hand and return its rank. As in Poker > http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/games/rules/hand-rankings/. > > Which of the following is better and more Pythonic ? > Your two code segments will do different things. > > def poker(hands): > return max(hands, key=hand_rank) > In this case, the "hand_rank" function will take a single hand, and return its rank value. Additionally, the "poker" function will return the highest ranked hand. > > or > > def poker(hands): > return max(hand_rank(hands)) > In this case, the "hand_rank" function will take an iterable of hands and return an iterable of hand ranks. Additionally, the "poker" function will return the rank of the highest ranked hand. If that is the desired result, I would recommend writing this as: def poker(hands): return max(map(hand_rank, hands)) which will result in hand_rank taking a single hand and returning its rank value (similar to the first code segment you provided), rather than having hand_rank deal with iterables of hands. However, that has more to do with how you want hand_rank to behave, and where else it might be used.
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