Newbie: finding the key/index of the min/max element

[Mats Wichmann]

On Thu, 02 May 2002 13:40:38 GMT, Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it>
wrote:


:Sure, but it's an easy point to see -- "adding something costs little, so
:why not just add it?  removing something costs a lot, so never remove!".
:
:Clearly, each of the many "persistent" questions tends to relate to
:features of other languages the querants know.  They're used to them, so
:they *WANT* them -- if they're decent rationalizers (and most of us are)
:they'll come up with oodles of almost-plausibly-sounding "reasons", of
:course.  "wild and wooly" ideas not tried elsewhere do come up, but not
:repetitively (that I recall -- and this makes sense to me).
:
:Giving in may appear to make some kind of local-optimization sense in each 
:and any case.  Net result, should you give in to the pressure in each case, 
:a language so huge, bloated, and unwieldy as to dwarf C++ or Perl or ....


And let's recall that there are programming targets that are not as
capable as our common-or-garden desktop.  E.g. Pythonists may want to
use their favorite language on a PDA which may offer only 32 or 64 MB
total memory, with "secondary storage" of another 64MB.  It's a bit of
a shoehorning job today.  But something to consider when the "memory
is cheap" thought becomes too ingrained...
Mats Wichmann