Question about sorted in Python 3.0rc1

[josh logan]

On Sep 22, 3:41 am, Arnaud Delobelle <arno... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 22 Sep, 04:05, josh logan <dear.jay.lo... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hello,
>
> > I have 2 questions. Say I have this class:
>
> > class Player(object):
> >     def __init__(self, fname, lname, score):
> >         self.score = score
> >         self.fname = fname
> >         self.lname = lname
> >     def __cmp__(self, other):
> >         return (-cmp(self.score, other.score) or
> >                 cmp(self.lname, other.lname) or
> >                 cmp(self.fname, other.fname))
> >     def __repr__(self):
> >         return 'Player(fname={0.fname}, lname={0.lname},
> > score={0.score})'.format(self)
> >     def __eq__(self, others):
> >         if isinstance(other, Player):
> >             return (self.score == other.score and
> >                     self.lname == other.lname and
> >                     self.fname == other.fname)
> >         return False
> >     def __ne__(self, others):
> >         return not self.__eq__(others)
>
> > fnames = ['Julie', 'Ben', 'Jason', 'David']
> > lnames = ['Parks', 'Smith']
> > scores = [100, 95, 95, 130, 58, 74]
>
> > import itertools as it
>
> > score_iter = it.cycle(scores)
>
> > P = [Player(fn, ln, next(score_iter)) for fn in fnames for ln in
> > lnames]
>
> > cmp(P[0], P[1]) # returns -1
>
> > sorted(P) # throws TypeError: unorderable types Player() < Player()
>
> > The sorted function works when I define __lt__.
> > I must be misreading the documentation, because I read for the
> > documentation __cmp__ that it is called if none of the other rich
> > comparison functions are defined.
> > Is this a bug in Python 3.0rc1, or am I missing something?
>
> > Secondly, say that we suddenly need another sorting order, where we
> > want to sort by decreasing score and then by DECREASING last name
> > (instead of increasing last name, defined above). Now that the
> > comparison function argument is taken away from the sorted builtin,
> > how do we accomplish this with the "key" parameter?
>
> > Thank you
>
> I don't know about __cmp__ but for the second part of the question you
> can probably do:
>
>     sorted(P, key=lambda p: (p.score, p.lname), reverse=True)
>
> HTH
>
> --
> Arnaud

Thank you for the prompt reply. I didn't think my second question
completely through.

A better example would be sorting by increasing last name and
decreasing first name. This would be easy with the sort function
comparator, but I can't see how to do the same with the key argument.
Is the only solution to decorate the Player objects in another class
that has the appropriate __cmp__ function (or whatever is needed) and
then retrieve the Player objects back?