[Python-ideas] __sort__ special member

Mark Adam dreamingforward at gmail.com
Fri Jul 20 18:44:26 CEST 2012


On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Oleg Broytman <phd at phdru.name> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 06:11:52PM +0200, David Townshend <
> aquavitae69 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was quite surprised to find that nobody seems to have suggested this
> > before, because it seems like an obvious idea. Basically, add a special
> > method __sort__ which, if specified, is used when sorted() is called. I
> can
> > think of two immediate use cases:
> >
> > 1. When an object wants sorted() to return something other than a list,
> > e.g. dict.__sort__ could return an OrderedDict.
> > 2. When there is a more efficient method of sorting a specific sequence.
> > E.g. sorting a range object should be trivial.
> >
> > Is there some obvious reason why nobody has suggested this before?  Is it
> > worth pursuing?
>
>    Because it's too application-specific?
>
> What are you talking about.  This would solve the issue of ordering for
dicts that became contentious a few years ago.  If people don't like the
arbitrary ordering, they can subclass it.

mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20120720/8929f1e6/attachment.html>


More information about the Python-ideas mailing list