[Python-3000] sort vs order (was: What should the focus for 2.6 be?)

[Jim Jewett]

On 8/24/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Another change that is unlikely to be available in 2.x is the
> rationalization of comparisons. In 3.0, "1 < 'abc'" will raise a
> TypeError; there's just no way to backport this behavior, since again
> it requires pervasive changes to the implementation.

I still believe that this breaks an important current use case for
sorting, but maybe the right answer is a different (but similar) API.

Given an arbitrary collection of objects, I want to be able to order
them in a consistent manner, at least within a single interpreter
session.  (Consistency across sessions/machines/persistence/etc would
be even better, but isn't essential.)

The current sort method works pretty well; the new one wouldn't.  It
would be enough (and arguably an improvement, because of broken
objects) if there were a consistent_order equivalent that just caught
the TypeError and then tried a fallback for you until it found an
answer.

-jJ