how can I sort a bunch of lists over multiple fields?

[Steven Bethard]

Lonnie Princehouse wrote:
> Right, but suppose it's expensive to generate each part of the key -
> e.g. a database query or some kind of hash, so it doesn't make sense to
> compute the whole key in advance if the first part is sufficient to
> establish an ordering most of the time.   This is what I had in mind (I
> should have been more clear about that)

Yeah, that's probably a reasonable use case for the cmp= argument, as is 
any case where you're *really* tight for memory (the key= sort requires 
small extra auxiliary structures to hold the key values).

For newbies though, I still suspect that key= is the easiest and fastest 
answer to most sorting problems.  Advanced users will, of course, need 
more advanced techniques. =)

STeVe