A small suggestion for Python

[Matt Dunford]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:

>"Matt Dunford" <kno at jtan.com> wrote in message
>news:G74HuE.AGn.0.sinope at news.jtan.com...
>    [snip]
>> Although, I wouldn't mind having a builtin method that returns a sorted
>> array.  Then we could do something like this:
>>
>> dict = { 'this' : 1, 'that' : 2 }
>> for key in dict.keys().sort():
>> print key

>And instead we have to do

>    for key in return_sorted(dict.keys()):
>        print key

>Is it that much of a problem...?  return_sorted's pretty trivial too:

>def return_sorted(alist):
>    alist.sort()
>    return alist


I have no problem with it.  But just to be pendantic, your return_sorted def 
doesn't do what I'm trying to get at.  I'm thinking more along the lines of

def return_sorted(alist):
    import copy
    sorted = copy.copy(alist)
    sorted.sort()
    return sorted
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