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

Holger Krekel pyth at devel.trillke.net
Fri Oct 17 16:49:24 EDT 2003 
Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> > 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):
> >         ...
> 
> You can do reverse with [::-1] now.

sure, but it's a bit unintuitive and i mentioned not only reverse :-)

Actually i think that 'reverse', 'sort' and 'extend' algorithms
could nicely be put into the new itertools module.  

There it's obvious that they wouldn't mutate objects.  And these algorithms
(especially extend and reverse) would be very efficient as iterators because 
they wouldn't create temporary lists/tuples. 

cheers,

    holger
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