copysort patch, was RE: [Python-Dev] inline sort option

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:24 PM 10/20/03 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >
> > [Ian cites "preferably only one obvious way to do it" to justify a sort 
> idiom]
>
>That's one of the best ways I've seen this formulated.

Does this extend by analogy to other requests for short functions that are 
commonly reimplemented?  Not that any spring to mind at the moment; it just 
seems to me that inline sorting is one of a set of perennially requested 
such functions or methods, where the current standard answer is "but you 
can do it yourself in only X lines!".


>If Alex's proposal to have list.sorted() as a factory function is
>acceptable to the non-English-speaking crowd, I think we can settle on
>that.  (Hm, an alternative would be to add a "sort=True" keyword
>argument to list()...)

Wouldn't it need to grow key and cmpfunc, too?