On 04/03/2013 12:30 PM, Ian Kelly wrote:
On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Dave Angel <da...@davea.name> wrote:
I'm also puzzled. I thought that the sort algorithm used a hash of all the
items to be sorted, and only reverted to a raw comparison of the original
values when the hash collided. Is that not the case? Or is the code you
post here only used when the hash collides?
I think you are mistaken, because I don't see how that could work. If
the hashes of two items are different then you can assume they are not
equal, but sorting requires a partial ordering comparison, not simply
an equality comparison. You cannot determine which item is less or
greater than the other from the hash values alone.
You are of course correct. The particular data that Neil had provided
might well have had many duplicates, but that won't be the typical case,
so there's not much point in doing an unordered hash. I guess I was
confusing it with the key= argument for modifying sort order, where the
key function might replace a slow-to-compare data type with something
faster.
--
DaveA
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
