Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:31:09 -0700, geremy condra wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> Or, an alternative approach would be for one of the cmp-supporters to
>> take the code for Python's sort routine, and implement your own
>> sort-with- cmp (in C, of course, a pure Python solution will likely be
>> unusable) and offer it as a download. For anyone who knows how to do C
>> extensions, this shouldn't be hard: just grab the code in Python 2.7
>> and make it a stand- alone function that can be imported.
>>
>> If you get lots of community interest in this, that is a good sign that
>> the solution is useful and practical, and then you can push to have it
>> included in the standard library or even as a built-in.
>>
>> And if not, well, at least you will be able to continue using cmp in
>> your own code.
> 
> I don't have a horse in this race, but I do wonder how much of Python
> could actually survive this test. My first (uneducated) guess is "not
> very much"- we would almost certainly lose large pieces of the string
> API and other builtins, and I have no doubt at all that a really
> significant chunk of the standard library would vanish as well. In fact,
> looking at the data I took from PyPI a while back, it's pretty clear
> that Python's feature set would look very different overall if we
> applied this test to everything.


I don't understand what you mean by "this test".

I'm certainly not suggesting that we strip every built-in of all methods 
and make everything a third-party C extension. That would be insane.

Nor do I mean that every feature in the standard library should be forced 
to prove itself or be removed. The features removed from Python 3 were 
deliberately few and conservative, and it was a one-off change (at least 
until Python 4000 in the indefinite future). If something is in Python 3 
*now*, you can assume that it won't be removed any time soon.

What I'm saying is this: cmp is already removed from sorting, and we 
can't change the past. Regardless of whether this was a mistake or not, 
the fact is that it is gone, and therefore re-adding it is a new feature 
request. Those who want cmp functionality in Python 3 have three broad 
choices:

(1) suck it up and give up the fight; the battle is lost, move on;

(2) keep arguing until they either wear down the Python developers or get 
kill-filed; never give up, never surrender;

(3) port the feature that they want into a third-party module, so that 
they can actually use it in code, and then when they have evidence that 
the community needs and/or wants this feature, then try to have it re-
added to the language.

I'm suggesting that #3 is a more practical, useful approach than writing 
another hundred thousand words complaining about what a terrible mistake 
it was. Having to do:

from sorting import csort

as a prerequisite for using a comparison function is not an onerous 
requirement for developers. If fans of functional programming can live 
with "from functools import reduce", fans of cmp can live with that.



-- 
Steven