Separating __cmp__ from < and > ?

[Rainer Deyke]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:39989C42.AC6D8C9B at alcyone.com...
> In my case, I had a class which encapsulated (essentially) an ordered
> pair, which sounds like a similar situation to yours.  I wanted to test
> for equality and inequality, but inequalities have little meaning.  So I
> simply defined a __cmp__ method that does something meaningful on
> equalities and inequalities, and does something arbitrary on
> inequalities.  In this case it was simple running cmp on tuples
> constructed from the two coordinates:
>
>     def __cmp__(self, other):
>         """Not very meaningful for inequalities."""
>         return cmp(self.tuple(), other.tuple())

This is probably the best approach.  In Python, all objects are well ordered
by default.  If the interpreter knows whether type([]) is greater or less
than 5, then there is really no excuse for objects of the same class not
being well ordered.


--
Rainer Deyke (root at rainerdeyke.com)
Shareware computer games           -           http://rainerdeyke.com
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