[Python-ideas] list.sort with a int or str key

[Raymond Hettinger]

>> ISTM, the performance would be about the same as you already get from attrgetter(), itemgetter(), and methodcaller().  Also, those three tools are already more flexible than the proposal, for example:
>> 
>> attrgetter('lastname', 'firstname')  # key = lambda r: (r.lastname, r.firstname)
>> itemgetter(0, 7)                     # key = lambda r: (r[0], r[7])
>> methodcaller('get_stats', 'size')    # key = lambda r: r.get_stats('size')
> 
> It is easy to not know about these.

FWIW, those and other sorting related topics are covered in the sorting-howto:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting/

We link to that from the main docs for sorted():
http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#sorted


> I think the doc set could usefully use an expanded entry on *key functions*

That might also make a useful entry to the glossary.


Raymond


P.S.   I don't know that it applies here but one limitation of the docs
is that they can get too voluminous.  Already, it is a significant time
investment just to read the doc page on builtin functions.  You can
kill a whole afternoon just reading the docs for unittest and logging.
The gestalt of the language gets lost when the docs get too fat.
Instead, I like the howto write-ups because they bring together many 
thoughts on a single topic. 
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