Obsolesence of <> (fwd)

[Christian Tanzer]

mertz at gnosis.cx wrote:

> Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters  <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
> >I'm not really sure I like the change Alex points to.  It makes
> >something like the below fail:
> >
> >  l = [(1+1j),(2-2j),Klass(),Klass(),Klass,5,4,3,'c','b','a']
> >  l.sort()
> >
> >Many of the comparisons have no particular meaning. But it is nice to have
> >everything have some arbitrary inequality relation in order to create
> >partial orderings on the subsets of things that really do have an order.
> 
> aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
> |Yup, this used to work.  Then came Unicode....
> 
> Huh?  What does Unicode have to do with anything?  The below works fine,
> for example:
> 
>   Python 2.0.42-S1.2.23 (#0, Apr 25 2001, 20:59:49) [GNU C/C++] on os2
>   Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>   >>> x = u"spam"
>   >>> y = "spam"
>   >>> z = 1+1j
>   >>> w = u"eggs"
>   >>> x < y
>   0
>   >>> x < z
>   0
>   >>> x < w
>   0
> 
> At least in my 2.0 version, unicode strings seem to compare fine to
> other things (I didn't try *every* other thing... but the obvious few
> are happy).

Just try:

>>> "öäb" == u"abc"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

:(

Being able to sort lists no matter what elements they contained was
very handy for some purposes...


-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
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