'20' <= 100

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth I:
  [...]
> Those who want comparisons never to raise exceptions might be
> happy with a solution in which, say, all normal strings are < all
> Unicode strings.  This makes all the comparisons determinate, at
> least, but it would lead to counterintuitive behaviour in simple
> cases: we'd have, for example, 'x' < u'x', while naïvely one would
> expect 'x' == u'x' (which is true at present).

Another possibility, no doubt mentioned before:

    def cmpstr(s1, s2):
        for c1, c2 in map(None, s1, s2):
            if c1 is None:
                return -1
            elif c2 is None:
                return 1
            else:
                diff = cmp(ord(c1), ord(c2))
                if diff:
                    return diff
        else:
            return 0

All such comparisons are determinate; the result is consistent
with the present meaning of < in cases where < does not raise an
exception.

The weird thing about this cmpstr is that it extends the privilege
presently enjoyed by ASCII to ISO-8859-1:

    >>> cmpstr('ma\xEFs', u'ma\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS}s')
    0

-- 
Steven Taschuk                staschuk at telusplanet.net
"I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head
 began to hurt from his banality."   -- _Seven_ (1996)