How do you pass a standard operator such as '<' as a parameter?

[Lonnie Princehouse]

> For non-standard data types, you would obviously define a '<' function and
> then pass it as a parameter at initialisation, but how can you pass one of
> the standard operators? i.e. '<'.

Lambda! 

my_list = OrderedList([], comparator = lambda a,b: a < b)

You might also consider using the same style of comparator function
that list.sort() uses.  This returns 1 for greater than, 0 for equal,
and -1 for less than.  Then you could use the builtin cmp function,
and could also sort the OrderedList directly with the comparator:

class OrderedList(list):
  def __init__(self, initial=[], comparator=None):
    list.__init__(self, initial)
    self.ComparisonFunc = comparator
    self.sort()

  def sort(self, *args):
    # use self.ComparisonFunc as default
    if len(args):  
      comparator = args[0] 
    elif self.ComparisonFunc:
      args.append(self.ComparisonFunc)    
    list.sort(self, *args)