best way to determine sequence ordering?

[Steven Bethard]

Steven Bethard wrote:
> John Salerno wrote:
>> If I want to make a list of four items, e.g. L = ['C', 'A', 'D', 'B'], 
>> and then figure out if a certain element precedes another element, 
>> what would be the best way to do that?
>>
>> Looking at the built-in list functions, I thought I could do something 
>> like:
>>
>> if L.index('A') < L.index('D'):
>>     # do some stuff
> 
> This is probably a pretty reasonable approach

Just to clarify, because there seems to be some confusion.  I would 
absolutely go with this approach unless you have profiled and found it 
to be a bottleneck.  It's clear, concise, and quite fast.

STeVe