[Python-Dev] Cleaning-up the new unittest API

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Nov 2 23:33:39 CET 2010


exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:

> I can't help thinking that most of this confusion is caused by using < 
> for determining subsets.  If < were not defined for sets and people had 
> to use "set.issubset" (which exists already), then sorting a list with 
> sets would raise an exception, a much more understandable failure mode 
> than getting back a list in arbitrary order.

Personally I think it was premature to throw out __cmp__.

What should have happened instead is for __cmp__ to be
augmented with a fourth outcome, "not equal but unordered".
Then operations such as sorting that require a total ordering
could use __cmp__ and complain if they get an unordered
result.

-- 
Greg


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