alwayssortedlist (was Re: On PEP 322 (ireverse))

[Jeremy Fincher]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message news:<HaVnb.65220$e5.2392011 at news1.tin.it>...
> Perfectly right.  If you DO want a listoid container that keeps its
> elements sorted, that's not hard to make for yourself.  There are
> basically two obvious implementation strategies:
>   -- ensure the underlying list is re-sorted at each insertion,
>      append &c, and/or
>   -- let the underlying list grow as it will on insertion &c, but
>      make sure it's sorted at any method that accesses it (you can
>      use a flag -- 'have there being any append/insert/... since
>      the last sort?' -- to re-sort only when needed).
> 
> I'll choose the first for general use because:
>   -- accesses are much more frequent than modifications,
>   -- list.sort is VERY fast when a list is "nearly sorted"
>   -- the second approach would require sorting also on many
>      kind of changes (e.g. __setitem__ -- to ensure the items
>      being replaced ARE those the user expects...)
> &c.

Any reason he shouldn't just use bisect.insort?

Jeremy