On 10/17/19, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:52:50 +0100, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> > declaimed the following: > >>Researchers find bug in Python script may have affected hundreds of >> studies >>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/chemists-discover-cross-platform-python-scripts-not-so-cross-platform/ > > That article bugs me... > > As I understand it, the results are affected by the ORDER in which, > otherwise independent, file NAMES were returned by the OS. > > Fine: manually ordering the names by some algorithm produces consistent > results across various OSs -- but what evidence is there that this file > name sort is producing "correct" results? What is the sorting criteria -- > it is not mentioned in the article. Are the file names time-stamped (in > which case a time-ordered sort does make sense)?
I'm bugged by how the article mis-characterizes the fundamental problem. The operating system has nothing to do with the order of a directory listing, which varies even with an OS, depending on the file system. The latter could store each entry in a tree structure that's sorted by filename, or it could use a mapping with hash values, or it could simply use the first available slot in a list, based on the order of past create and delete operations. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
