I just got a comment from another user suggesting modifying the min/max.__cmp__ so that they are the actual minimum and maximum.
An interesting approach, which makes some sense to me.
Not to me. Random reuses like this would make Python into a mysterious language.
This was my suggestion. I am for this PEP and am willing to write the reference implementation for the new min and max builtins if there's enough interest.
Not from me -- don't waste your time.
I have, like some others here, used my own One True Large Object. I think the best reason to have One True Large Object is because you can't really compare two implementations of the One True Large Object and expect to get a meaningful result out of it.
For the record, my use case had to do with a giant sorted list of tuples and the bisect module. The first element of a tuple was a timestamp, the rest of the tuple isn't worth explaining but I never wanted to compare against it. The "database" had two primary operations, inserting records *after* a timestamp, and finding every record between two timestamps. Let's take a look:
Your example (snipped here) seems to ask for a different kind of data structure, rather than an object larger than everything else. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)