"a in b" calls a.__cmp__, why?

[Gerrit Holl]

Hello,

Why does a container-sequence's __contains__ call obj.__cmp__?

  0 >>> class Foo(object):
  0 ...  def __cmp__(self, other):
  0 ...   print "comparing"
  0 ...   return cmp(id(self), id(other))
  0 ...
  2 >>> l=[Foo(), Foo(), Foo()]
  3 >>> l[0] in l
comparing
True

Why do lists and tuples do this? Or is it unwanted/a bug?

It means a serious impact on 
speed for me, since I'm writing a game and __cmp__ is used to
determine the drawing order, (layers etc.), which is not extremely
expensive but too expensive to do each frame: I can cache my sprites
and resort it if and only if sprites appear or disappear from a
certain area, but I do need to do membership tests each frame...

By testing and playing, I see only one way to suppress this:

  7 >>> l[2] in dict.fromkeys(l)
True

However, is this trick really necessary?

yours,
Gerrit.

P.S.
Do other people also have CVS problems? In 98% of my tries to
do "cvs update -PCdfR", I get an error message: either
"reading from server: Connection reset by peer", or
"end of file from server (consult above messages if any)". The
same is true when diffing. In 2% of the tries, however, all
works as it should, so I'm cvs-update'ing in a while loop
while breaking out of it when it succeeds... :(

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