George Sakkis <george.sak...@gmail.com> added the comment: There's nothing special about my use cases; I'd even go as far as to suggest that this is more often than not the desired behavior in general.
Say that you have to select the top 3 chess players and there are two players with equal Elo rating at positions 3 and 4. Whom do you select? Without a tie-breaking method, it's only fair to select both and return 4 players in total instead of exactly 3. The current method selects "arbitrarily" (at least with respect to the key function) which of the equally-keyed items to return. This is necessary in some cases by external constraints (say, you can hire only 1 person) but there are quite a few cases that "fairness" is more important than a hard constraint on the number of returned objects. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5669> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
