On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Dillon Collins <dillonco@comcast.net>wrote: On Thursday 16 October 2008, Greg Ewing wrote:
It still bothers me that there is no longer a way to provide a single method that performs a three-way comparison. Not only because total ordering is the most common case, but because it makes comparing sequences for ordering very inefficient -- you end up comparing everything twice, once for < and once for =.
As a note, you can always implement <= as well, thereby reducing the overhead of the 'unimplemented' operations to simply negating their complement. I do this whenever == and < share non-trivial code.
How does this help ? If the result of "<=" is True, you still have to differentiate between < and == to know whether to stop or proceed with the next element in the sequence. George