Replacing cmp with key for sorting

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

George Sakkis:
> but I guess there's not much more room for improvement.

That's nonsense, Python is a high level language, so there's nearly
always room for improvement (even in programs written in assembly you
can generally find faster solutions).
If speed is what you look for, and your strings are ASCII then this is
much faster:

tab = "".join(map(chr, xrange(256)))[::-1]
s.sort(key=lambda x: x.translate(tab), reverse=True)

Bye,
bearophile