On 29/08/2020 14:17, Barry Scott wrote:
On 29 Aug 2020, at 13:42, Filipp Bakanov <fil...@bakanov.su
<mailto:fil...@bakanov.su>> wrote:
I'd like to propose adding argmax and argmin functions to the python
list. These functions return the index of a maximum / minimum element
of the list. Eg:
a = [1, 4, 2, 3]
print(a.argmax()) # 1
print(a.argmin()) # 0
It's a very popular request (based on stackoverflow
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16945518/finding-the-index-of-the-value-which-is-the-min-or-max-in-python
), and currently there is no elegant way to find it.
What do you think?
Just do this:
>>> a=[1,4,2,3]
>>> min(a)
1
>>> a.index(min(a))
0
>>> a.index(max(a))
1
Barry
This has the drawback of passing twice over the list. The following
doesn't, but the complexity somewhat makes Filipp's point:
>>> min((e, i) for i, e in enumerate(a))[1]
0
I think one would want argmin() and argmax() to work with general
iterables, so I wonder if the stdlib would not be a better home than
list itself. I half expected it to be an itertools recipe. The advantage
of a recipe is that variations such as needing the last occurrence of
the minimum are easily accommodated.
Jeff Allen
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