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[Python-Dev] decorate-sort-undecorate

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Oct 13 18:07:48 EDT 2003 
> I've seen proposals for an extension to list comprehension, which would 
> be quite nice:
> 
>    [s for s in lst sortby s.lower()]
> 
> It reads nicely, and avoids lambdas and tiny helper functions.  Also 
> handles the sort-returns-None criticism.  But it adds syntax.  And 
> since it's not an in-place sort it won't perform as well (but probably 
> better than the decorator idiom anyway...?)

This has a very low probability to be accepted.  It suffers IMO from
the "SQL syndrome": having reserved words to the language that are
only meaningful in a very specific syntax yet are reserved
everywhere.  Until we have a general way to avoid that, I'd rather
not go that route.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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