On 25 April 2015 at 00:50, Joao S. O. Bueno jsbueno@python.org.br wrote:
Since it does not mean anything (as in meaningless) to compare ranges without specifying a "key", and since ordering functions in Python do allow a "key" - it looks like this problem is already resolved, whatever the need:
sorted([range(10), range(1,14, 3)], key=len)
[range(1, 14, 3), range(0, 10)]
sorted([range(10), range(1,14, 3)], key=max)
[range(0, 10), range(1, 14, 3)]
sorted([range(10), range(1,14, 3)], key=min)
[range(0, 10), range(1, 14, 3)]
ranges() are actually defined as memory-efficient tuples these days (https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#ranges), and have supported "==" and "!=" using sequence comparison semantics since 3.3, so there's a defined natural order for them these days (the ordering of the equivalent tuples).
That said, I'm still not sure it makes sense to allow ordering them. The cases I can think of where it might make sense (such as ordering graph nodes) would all use an actual tuple instead.
Cheers, Nick.