2012/2/8 Masklinn
<masklinn@masklinn.net>
The ``bisect`` stuff is pretty neat, although probably underused
(especially the insorts), but their usefulness is limited by the
requirement that the lists directly contain sortable items, as opposed
to ``sorted`` or ``list.sort``.
It's possible to "use" them by copy/pasting the (Python) functions
into the project/library code and adding either a custom key directly
or a key function, but while this can still yield an
order-of-magnitude speed gain over post-sorting sequences, it's
cumbersome and it loses the advantage of _bisect's accelerators.
Therefore, I believe it would be pretty neat to add an optional
``key=`` keyword (only?) argument, with the same semantics as in
``sorted``. It would make ``bisect`` much easier to use especially
in stead of append + sorted combinations. The key should work for
both insertion functions and bisection search ones.
bisect key
This was proposed several times on the issue tracker (search for "bisect key"),
and these proposals have always been rejected:
The last one summarizes the reasons of the rejection.
contains a link to a "SortedCollection" recipe.
I haven't looked at the SortedCollection class in detail, but you could try to have it included in the stdlib...