[Tutor] Overloading comparisons

[Hugo González Monteverde]

Hi all,

I defined an object wich describes a video clip, like this

class VideoSegment:
     def __init__(self, filename):
         # Attributes that have to be present
         self.filename = filename


The thing is, I will define an array of these objects for a cache, and 
would like to keep that array having less than 1000 elements. 
Periodically I will check it, and remove the oldest element.

suppose I have the modification time as an argument.

self.time = os.stat(self.filename).st_mtime

I can define the following for sorting the array:

     def __cmp__(self, other):
         """polymorph for comparisons"""
         if self.time < other.time:
             return -1
         elif self.time > other.time:
             return 1
         else:
             return 0

But then I want to test for existance doing

if 'lala.avi' in myarray:

and that has to be done by name. Is there any way this could work? My 
current __cmp__ of course treats objects with the same timestamp as 
identical objects.

Any comments are greatly appreciates, maybe my OOP is just sloppy...

Hugo