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list.sort, was Re: [Python-Dev] decorate-sort-undecorate

Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer at conectiva.com
Fri Oct 17 14:39:16 EDT 2003 
>     >> If anything at all, i'd suggest a std-module which contains e.g. 
>     >> 'sort', 'reverse' and 'extend' functions which always return
>     >> a new list, so that you could write:
>     >> 
>     >> for i in reverse(somelist):
>     >> ...
> 
>     Gustavo> You can do reverse with [::-1] now.
> 
> I don't think that is considered "stable" in the sorting sense.  If I
> sort in descending order vs ascending order, they are not mere
> reversals of each other.  I may well still want adjacent records whose
> sort keys are identical to remain in the same order.
> 
> What will the new reverse=True keyword arg do?

Erm.. what are you talking about!? :-)

I was just saying that his reverse(...) method is completely equivalent
to [::-1] now, so it could safely be implemented as:

  reverse = lambda x: x[::-1]

I wasn't trying to mention anything about sort nor keyword arguments
(perhaps I just wasn't the real target of the message!?).

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net
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