On 22.11.2017 07:22, Nick Timkovich wrote:

Functions are great. I'm a big fan of functions. However,

1. Once there are several that all have the same thing as an argument: thing_operation1(thing, arg), thing_operation2(thing, arg)...it's about time to bind them together.

2. And especially for the heap "soft-datatype": once it's heapified, naively modifying it with other methods will ruin the heap invariant. **The actual list you pass around can't be treated as a list.**

Two important aspects to which I want to add some thoughts.

The reason why I created xheap was because I actually needed a more complex datastructure which required more bookkeeping:

1) custom orders on the same data (list)
2) fast removal from within the heap

The plain "Heap" implementation (object wrapper of heapq) was just for the sake of completion.

Cheers,
Sven

PS: I tend to think that implementing xheap was easier BECAUSE the stdlib provided a function-only heap implementation. Nonetheless, both ways do have their merits.