On 12/4/2014 5:35 AM, Albert van der Horst wrote:
I agree that it is a useful function and that it is doing the right thing. What is wrong is the name. I refer to the fact that it is not returning the maximum. It returns the iterator value that leads to the maximum. A function that doesn't return a maximum shouldn't be called maximum.
The key function serves the same purpose as with sort. It define a custom ordering of items, not the values returned. 'x < y' is defined as key(x) < key(y), where the comparison of keys uses the standard (and for numbers, natural) built-in ordering. So max returns the max value according to the order you define with the key function. The default key is the identity function, so the default order is the builtin order.
-- Terry Jan Reedy -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
