sorting a dictionary

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Thu Feb 6 04:43:39 EST 2003


On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 03:31, Alex Martelli wrote:
> In my case, it's the inconsistency between 2j<'1' working while 2j<1
> doesn't -- if both raised (or neither raised, as in 1.5.2), I could
> see the sense of it.  I'd prefer the 1.5.2 behavior (so the subtle
> distinguos I had to draw in this thread were not needed) but I could
> accept "no complex number can EVER be compared with ANYTHING" as
> having some use (and no practical downside wrt the alternative of
> "complex numbers can be compared with strings but not with numbers").

It would be better if there was an alternative to < (or cmp) that was
potentially arbitrary but also stable and would not raise exceptions. 
Like maybe "order".

Then, would an entirely arbitrary function be appropriate?  Like:

def order(a, b):
    return cmp(id(a), id(b))



-- 
Ian Bicking  ianb at colorstudy.com  http://colorstudy.com
4869 N. Talman Ave., Chicago, IL 60625  /  773-275-7241
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 killing innocent people" -- Howard Zinn





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