[Tutor] Re: Re: Re: list method sort()

[Andrei]

Tim Peters wrote on Fri, 2 Apr 2004 15:28:23 -0500:

> [Andrei]
>> Well, yes, you can argue that *all* operations which modify in-place
>> should return the modified object as well - I don't know if this
>> would be better or not: ...
> 
> Life would be hell in interactive Python shells if these things *didn't*
> return None:
> 
>>>> somelist.sort()
> 
> Oops!  Nobody wants to sit and wait for an arbitrary amount of output then.

Very good point there; I should have thought of it, as I've written a
little calculator-type application in Python which works similarly to the
Python shell, but only evaluates expressions. I had to add special syntax
and code in order to avoid exactly this kind of output.

<snip>

> Against my better judgment, Python 2.4 is adding a sorted() function to the
> builtins, to stop people whining about this particular case.  That's against

Oh, I didn't know. I don't mind it, but I'm not very fond of the name as to
me it sounds like it's supposed to return a boolean indicating whether that
particular list is sorted or not.

-- 
Yours,

Andrei

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