Thanks for all the replies. A couple of comments. 1. I think the usefulness of an argmax built-in can be assessed by looking at other languages (and e.g. at numpy). So I do not buy the "not needed" argument as presented. More like "haven't got around to it," I'm thinking.
2. The particular use case this time is strategy choice. The desired strategy (i.e., index) is the one with the highest payoff. 3. Thanks to George, and to Peter for noticing a subtle difference in the implementations. Alan Isaac -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
