On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list