min/max: "stable" invariant?

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Mar 11 19:34:01 EDT 2008


"Giovanni Bajo" <rasky at develer.com> wrote in message 
news:jiEBj.16245$q53.9583 at tornado.fastwebnet.it...
| Hello,
|
| assuming that a sequence contains multiple elements with minimum/maximum
| value, do min/max guarantee to return the *first* element in the sequence
| among those?
|
| Example:
|
| >>> class A:
| ...     def __init__(self, x): self.x = x
| ...
| >>> L = [A(0), A(1), A(2), A(0)]
| >>> min(L, key=lambda a:a.x) is L[0]
| True
| >>> min(L, key=lambda a:a.x) is L[3]
| False
|
| Is this guaranteed by the Python language formal specification?
| Is this guaranteed to always by true in CPython? (I guess so)
|
| I can't find any mention in the documentation.

If there is no mention in the documentation (Lib Ref, Ch2 builtin 
functions), then there is no guarantee. 






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