Python's simplicity philosophy

[Andrew Dalke]

Paul Rubin:
> "Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> writes:
  [actually, I was quoting from the python-dev summary of Brett C's.

Paul:
> Changing the behavior of list.sort would be really bad, but I
> certainly favor adding a new method (maybe list.nsort).  There should
> also be list.nuniq which takes a sorted list and strips duplicate
> elements.

Do you want unix-style unique where repeats are merged into
one, so that 1 2 2 1 -> 1 2 1 or do you want it to return
items which only occur once, and you don't care about the
order (as in dict.from_keys([1, 2, 2, 1]).keys() which can
return [1, 2] or [2, 1]) or do you want the order of the keys
in the final list to maintain the same order as the initial list,
so that [2, 1, 1, 2] -> [2, 1] always?

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com