Mark Dickinson wrote: > Matthew Woodcraft wrote: >> In CPython, the builtin max() and min() have the property that if there >> are items with equal keys, the first item is returned. From a quick look >> at their source, I think this is true for Jython and IronPython too.
> It's actually not clear to me that this behaviour is ideal; it might > make more sense to have max() return the first item among equal > largest elements, and min() return the last item. I don't care a great deal what the behaviour is; I would like it to be consistent across Python versions, and I think the pragmatic way to achieve that is to document the current behaviour. > Can you give examples of code that relies on max and min returning the > first among equals? An existing regression test whose output depends on which choice is made. (I was writing some code today which had to duplicate the behaviour of a non-Python program which uses first-among-equals, which is what brought this question up. In that case I wouldn't think it unreasonable to have to hand-code the loop rather than using max(), but if in practice Python is always going to be first-among-equals, it seems to me we might as well be 'allowed' to take advantage of it.) -M- _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com