anonymous variable

[Alex Martelli]

"Vladimir Nesterovsky" <vnestr at netvision.net.il> wrote in message
news:9i88o3$hj41s$1 at ID-91128.news.dfncis.de...
> It might be viewed as a "value sort" or "sort by value",
> meaning that a natural sort is done on a list as if each
> its element was represented by some value comparable
> with the "<" operator, produced by a user-specified function:

Right; in addition (which I didn't show in my last post,
but explain in my Cookbook entry at
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52234)
it's also pretty easy to make it stable (so that items of the
original list that map to the same comparable remain in
the same order as in the original list, a frequent spec:-).


>   def vsort (ls, f):
>     x = map(lambda e,g=f : (g(e),e), ls)
>     x.sort()
>     return map(lambda p:p[1],x)
>
> and call it
>
>   alist = vsort(alist, lambda x: x[2])
>
> This is doing the same thing that your function is doing by a
> different syntax; knowing as little Python as I do I just don't
> know which way's faster. :-)

One should measure times in each specific case, but, roughly,
list comprehensions tend to be a smidgeon faster than map
with a lambda, a smidgeon slower than map when a real
function is already available and needs to be called anyway.


> In Perl they call it Schwartzian transform, but the paradigm's

That's what I thought, too, and I mention it in the Cookbook
entry, but I'm told the Schwartzian Transform is _specifically_
about making it all a one-liner with Perl's grep.  So I coined
the 'decorate=sort=undecorate' (DSU) name for the pattern
in the more-general case; descriptive, if nothing else:-).


Alex