If that's "intuitive" to you, our ideas about language design must be so different that I have low hopes for something useful coming out of this.
I don't know about that; until this thread, I've basically agreed with every direction Python has gone in the 5 years since I started using it, but that is a one-way relationship. Overloading min and max was one option, among quite a few, that would have resulted in min and max being what they do. You seem to hate it, so those of us who desire the functionality will seek other alternatives...
Are you against the *idea* of a top and bottom value, its location, or both?
So far *all* of the names that have been proposed for the concept suck, starting with "Some" and "Any", and now various ways to abuse builtins.
I am not against the concept of a universal extreme by itself, but IMO their use is fairly infrequent (except in your mind perhaps, because you've clearly become obsessed with it), so it should not be a builtin, nor disguised as a builtin.
Just so you know, I'm not obsessed with it. As my wife just pointed out, anything that I believe in, I go "balls-to-the-walls" arguing for regardless of consequences. Sometimes it alienates people; seemingly I have alienated you. I'm sorry if this is the case.
How about you write the Python code to implement proper universal extremes, put it in a module, and submit that module for inclusion of the standard library. Then my resistence would be a lot less (until Raymond Hettinger offers to reimplement it in C :-).
Hey, universalextremes.py seems a fine name for that module, and UniversalMaximum and UniversalMinimum seem fine names for the two objects in that module.
Sounds reasonable. Until my changes are available from CVS, you can catch the latest revision here http://josiahcarlson.no-ip.org/pep-0326.html which includes a sample implementation that could be easily placed into a universalextremes.py. Off list, Andrew Lentvorski has suggested operator.Min/Max as a location, which also sounds reasonable, but I don't know others feel about locating it in operators. - Josiah