Quick pep265 summary : People frequently want to count the occurrences of values in a dict, or sort the results of a d.items() call by value. This could be done by extending the current items() definition, or by creating a new function for the dict object (both requiring a C implementation).
In Python 2.4:
->>> ud = dict(a=1, b=2, c=3) ->>> from operator import itemgetter ->>> print sorted(ud.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True) [('c', 3), ('b', 2), ('a', 1)]
I'm not entirely sure who needs to be thanked for this addition, but it sure makes the 'decorate-sort-undecorate' idiom very, very easy to follow (which was, in fact, the point - I do remember that much of the discussion).
I think the addition of 'sorted', and the keyword arguments for both it and list.sort make PEP 265 somewhat redundant.
Seems like another solution to the problem, which makes this pep even less meaningful I'd say. Guess this this pep should be closed then ?