sorting on keys in a list of dicts

[It's me]

What does it mean by "stability in sorting"?

Can somebody please give a sample for using the code posted?  I am a little
lost here and I like to know more about the use of keys....

Thanks,

"Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan at iinet.net.au> wrote in message
news:mailman.298.1105112062.22381.python-list at python.org...
> Jeff Shannon wrote:
> > I suppose that your version has the virtue that, if the sortkey value is
> > equal, items retain the order that they were in the original list,
> > whereas my version will sort them into an essentially arbitrary order.
> >  Is there anything else that I'm missing here?
>
> Stability in sorting is a property not to be sneezed at - it means
switching to
> sorting by a second key gives the effect of "sort by key 1, then by key
2",
> whereas that doesn't hold with an unstable sort algorithm. If you've ever
used
> an application with an unstable sorting process and that only allows
sorting a
> table on one column at a time, you'll appreciate the frustration that can
cause :)
>
> Also, it's required to match the behaviour of the Python 2.4 version
(which gets
> to take advantage of the stability of the builtin sort).
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> -- 
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at email.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>              http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net