[Python-Dev] Priority queue (binary heap) python code

[Aahz]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2002, Tim Peters wrote:
> [Aahz]
>>
>> Should this PEP be split in two, then?  One for a new "AbstractData"
>> package (that would include the heap algorithm) and one for an update to
>> Queue that would use some algorithm from AbstractData.  The latter might
>> not even need a PEP.
> 
> I'm chuckling, but to myself <wink>.  By the time you add all the
> bells and whistles everyone may want out of "a priority queue", the
> interface gets so frickin' complicated that almost everyone will
> ignore the library and call bisect.insort() themself.

Fair enough -- but I didn't really know about bisect myself.  Looking at
the docs for bisect, it says that the code might be best used as a
source code example.  I think that having a package to dump similar
kinds of code might be a good idea.  It's not a substitute for a CS
course, but...

> And so on.  It's easier to write appropriate code from scratch in Python
> than to figure out how to *use* a package profligate enough to contain
> canned solutions for all common and reasonable use cases.  People have been
> known to gripe at the number of methods Python's simple little lists and
> dicts have sprouted -- heh heh.

Actually, I was expecting that the Queue PEP would be dropped once the
AbstractData package got some momentum behind.  I was just trying to be
a tiny bit subtle.  <wink>
-- 
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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