pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (=?iso-8859-1?q?Fran=E7ois?= Pinard):
The advantage is that the `.sorted()' method fits well within how Python has evolved recently, offering more concise and legible writings for frequent idioms.
I prefer the idea of making sorted() a separate function, because it can then be made to work on any sequence that can be copied and has a sort() method. To support specialised non-in-place sorting algorithms, it could check whether its argument has a sorted() method, and if not, fall back on the general implementation. This seems more Pythonic to me. Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+