On Sun, Dec 3, 2017 at 6:06 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
In fact, it's striking me that there may well be classes that are defining the comparison magic methods not because they want the objects to "work" with the comparison operators, but because that want them to work with sort and min, and max, and...

An existence proof: in NLTK, an __lt__ method added purely to facilitate consistent sorting (in doctests) of structured data objects for which comparison operators do not really make conceptual sense: https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/1902/files#diff-454368f06fd635b1e06c9bb6d65bd19bR689

Granted, calling min() and max() on collections of these objects would not make conceptual sense either. Still, __sort_key__ would have been cleaner than __lt__.

Cheers,
Nathan