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Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method

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On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python@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.

Geremy Condra

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Thread

Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Antoon Pardon <Antoon.Pardon@rece.vub.ac.be> - 2011-03-30 11:06 +0200
  Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2011-03-31 02:13 +0000
    Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Antoon Pardon <Antoon.Pardon@rece.vub.ac.be> - 2011-03-31 11:41 +0200
      Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2011-03-31 04:59 -0700
    Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method geremy condra <debatem1@gmail.com> - 2011-04-01 14:31 -0700
      Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2011-04-02 00:41 +0000
        Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method geremy condra <debatem1@gmail.com> - 2011-04-01 18:22 -0700
          Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2011-04-02 11:01 +0000
            Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method geremy condra <debatem1@gmail.com> - 2011-04-02 23:22 -0700
            Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Brian Quinlan <brian@sweetapp.com> - 2011-04-03 16:34 +1000
              Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2011-04-03 10:21 +0000
                Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method geremy condra <debatem1@gmail.com> - 2011-04-03 12:58 -0700
        Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2011-04-01 19:29 -0700
          Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2011-04-02 13:43 +1100
          Re: Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2011-04-02 11:27 +0000

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