Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have a list of items and a "rule" for ordering them. > > Unfortunately, the rule is not complete so it won't define the correct > order for any two items in that list. > > In other words, if I pick two random items from the list I may or may > not have a rule that dictates the order of those two items. The rule > could be "implicit" in that I got rules for other items, for instance:
That's called topological sorting and any reference on graph algorithms will describe how to do it. I don't know of Python code offhand but it's easy to write. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting gives a straightforward linear-time algorithm. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
