[DA]
On the other hand, I do think that it might be nice to have that sort of hook in the rich array world...
[me]
Really? The min/max functions already do all their looping in C.
[DA]
Right, but it might make sense to define min() on an array to mean something different than what min-the-builtin could guess from whatever __lt__ returns -- In fact, IIRC, min() on an array which implemented rich comparisons would raise an exception. I don't want to specify the semantics now (arrays are weird sequences), I just appreciate the hook. The semantics would probably depend on the flavor of array one wanted to use.
You're right. I bet Moshe is already coding... (Tip: you could reuse the same flag bit and simply rename it a bit, rather than having separate flag bits. The binary compatibility requirement is only between released versions, not between CVS versions.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)