
Guido> Yes. And I'm still hoping to remove __cmp__; there should be Guido> only one way to overload comparisons.
Moreover, for some data structures, the __cmp__ approach can be expensive. For example, if you're comparing sequences of any kind, and you know that the comparison is for == or !=, you have your answer immediately if the sequences differ in length. If you don't know what's being tested, as you wouldn't inside __cmp__, you may spend a lot more time to obtain a result that will be thrown away.
Yes. OTOH, as long as cmp() is in the language, these same situations are more efficiently done by a __cmp__ implementation than by calling __lt__ and then __eq__ or similar (it's hard to decide which order is best). So cmp() should be removed at the same time as __cmp__. And then we should also change list.sort(), as Tim points out. Maybe we can start introducing this earlier by using keyword arguments: list.sort(lt=function) sorts using a < implementation list.sort(cmp=function) sorts using a __cmp__ implementation --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)