[Python-Dev] argmax?
Alex Martelli
aleaxit at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 8 15:50:00 EST 2004
On Thursday 08 January 2004 06:59 pm, Josiah Carlson wrote:
...
> I don't know how anyone would feel about adding it to the standard
> library,
Personally, I have thought for quite a while that max and min should grow a
key= optional keyword argument, just like the sort method of list objects now
has in 2.4. Admittedly not quite equivalent to the argmax function proposed
(or to your itertools-based solution), but IMHO preferable -- because
somelist.sort will now allow just that shortcut to the typical "D-S-U" idiom
(if one wants the values as well as the underlying items, then an explicit
D-S-U [or however you want to name it when applied to min and max...] can of
course still perfectly well be performed, for somelist.sort as well as for
min and max). When one has grown used to somelist.sort(key=foobar),
having e.g. min(somelist, key=foobar) [for those cases in which one only needs
to know the item x of somelist which has minimal foobar(x), rather than the
whole somelist-ordered-by-foobar()] is just SUCH natural usage, IMHO...!
Alex
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