On Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:34:47 -0800, Greg wrote: > Forgive me, and be kind, as I am just a newby learning this language > out of M.L. Hetland's book. The following behavior of 2.4.1 seems very > strange
>>>> x = ['aardvark', 'abalone', 'acme', 'add', 'aerate'] >>>> x.sort(key=len) >>>> x > ['add', 'acme', 'aerate', 'abalone', 'aardvark'] >>>> x.sort(reverse=True) >>>> x > ['aerate', 'add', 'acme', 'abalone', 'aardvark'] > The function called on line 4, at least to me, should work on x as it > was on line 3, not the previously existing x on line 1. What gives? Why do you think it isn't operating on x as it is? The second sort is sorting in reverse lexicographic order, which is the result you get. I'm not running Python 2.4 so I can't test this, but to get the result you want I guess you want this: py> x.sort(key=len, reverse=True) py> x ['aardvark', 'abalone', 'aerate', 'acme', 'add'] or: py> x.sort(key=len) py> x.reverse() -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
