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[Python-Dev] decorate-sort-undecorate

Just van Rossum just at letterror.com
Tue Oct 14 13:07:34 EDT 2003 
Guido van Rossum wrote:

> > Why not use a special tuple type for the DSU algorithm that ignores
> > its last element when doing a comparison? It eliminates the problem
> > of creating a zillion int objects, and <speculation>it would be
> > easy to implement.</speculation>
> 
> If we're going to do a custom object, it should be a fixed-length
> struct containing (1) the key, (2) a C int of sufficient size to hold
> the record index; (3) a pointer to the record, and its comparison
> should only use (1) and (2).

But since we have a stable sort, (2) can be omitted. I agree with Neil
that this is a very clever idea!

Just
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