Raymond Hettinger <pyt...@rcn.com> writes: > There were two sorts in my post and only one in yours. > That's why you didn't get the same answer.
Whoops, missed that. > When Guido made the final call, I'm sure he was balancing > a number of goals including language simplification and > one-way-to-do-it. I'm also sure that sorting lazily > evaluated infinite sequences was not on his radar screen :-) I can't help wondering if there will be feature requests for a cmp argument for the rest of eternity until it eventually makes its way back in. > Psychologically, the thing that I find to be interesting is > that beginners and intermediate users seem to take to key > functions more readily than old timers. I think key is preferable in at least 90% of the cases. I also think a general purpose language should be able to handle 100% of the cases, so if key is all you have, there can be a gap to fill. > In contrast, some people who have have had deep experience with > cmp functions may tend to first think of cmp solutions and then > have a harder time seeing solutions with key functions. If you > grew-up on C's qsort() like I did, then a key function may not > be the first thing that pops into your head. That could be. > One other interesting data point: Python uses key functions > in min(), max(), heapq.nsmallest(), heapq.nlargest, and > itertools.groupby(). Those functions never supported a > cmp function argument, nor has one ever been requested. Interesting. Maybe someday... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
