Hi, Guido, and people. It recurrently happens that newcomers on the Python mailing list are surprised that list.sort() does not return the sorted list as value. I quite understand and agree that this is a good thing, because sorting is done in place, and Python programmers should stay aware and alert of this fact. Yet, I often see myself writing things like: keys = messages.keys() keys.sort() for key in keys: DO_SOMETHING This is not difficult to write, only slightly annoying. Writing: def sorted(list): list = list[:] list.sort() return list with the goal of simplifying the first excerpt into: for key in sorted(message.keys()): DO_SOMETHING it is not really worth for small programs. But in larger programs, where one often loops over the sorted element of a list, it might become reasonable to write this extra definition. My feeling is that the idiom is common enough to be worth a list method, so the above could be written instead: for key in message.keys().sorted(): DO_SOMETHING I immediately see an advantage and an inconvenient. The inconvenient is that users might confuse `.sort()' with `.sorted()', however we decide to spell `sorted', so the existence of both may be some kind of trap. The advantage is that the `.sorted()' method fits well within how Python has evolved recently, offering more concise and legible writings for frequent idioms. Tim invested a lot of courageous efforts so Python `sort' becomes speedier. A `.sorted()' method requires separate space to hold the result, using the same size as the original, and that guaranteed extra-space may eventually be put to good use for speeding up the sorting even more. The constraint of a sort being in-place has indeed a cost, and deep down, we agree that this constraint is artificial in contexts where `.sorted()' is really what the user needs. -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard