On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 10:16 AM, Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> 'xyz' < 'abc' >> False > > Interesting. But now we need to learn yet another set of > arbitrary rules. Consider this: > > >>> 'azzz' > 'zzz' > False > > Now, i'm not sure how Python decided that 'azzz' is not > greater than 'zzz' (and not because 'azzz' has a length of > 4!) , unless of course, Python is comparing the chars > positionally and then discarding the fourth 'z' (a la zip() > function behavior), but if we sum the chars in those strings > using the return value of `ord()`, this is what we get: > > >>> sum(map(ord, 'azzz')) > 463 > >>> sum(map(ord, 'zzz')) > 366 > > And now we can make it a one liner: > > >>> sum(map(ord, 'azzz')) > sum(map(ord, 'zzz')) > True > > Ah. That's much more intuitive. And i just hate when my > Python tells lies. ;-)
Uhhm.... have you ever used a dictionary? A phone book? An index (the sort in a book, not in a database)? While there are some subtleties to the actual sorting used, they're all broadly sorted by first letter, and then subsequent letters within that. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
