[Python-Dev] PEP 326 (quick location possibility)

[Tim Peters]

[Tim'
>> ...
>> There are few enough bugs in my code at this age that I take very
>> seriously any principled gimmick that could prevent repeating one.

[Raymond]
> Alex Martelli had proposed extending the key= idea to min() and max().
> The idea is to let those functions completely encapsulate the logic
> of searching for minimum and maximum elements:
>
>    bestplayer = min(players, key=attrgetter('points'))
>
> This would work equally well with other objective functions.

Different issue.  I didn't have "a sequence".  The loop was more like:

    global_minimum = made_up_value_presumed_to_be_unreachably_large
    while mote_to_look_at:
        do a ton of computation, yielding a candidate
        if score(candidate) < global_minimum:
            global_minimum = score(candidate)
            do a ton of stuff to prune the search based
                on the new (so far) local minimum
    return global_minimum

It's picking the made_up_value_presumed_to_be_unreachably_large that's a
brittle hack, and is specifically the source of the bug I mentioned.  Adding
new twists to min() wouldn't have made any difference to that.