Encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism

[MRAB]

On 17/07/2012 18:24, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 7/17/2012 8:01 AM, Lipska the Kat wrote:
>> On 17/07/12 09:45, Lipska the Kat wrote:
>>> Pythoners
>>>
>>> Python 2.7.3
>>> Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS
>>>
>>> I've been taking a brief look at Python.
>>>
>>
>> snip
>>
>> Well I've set myself a task.
>> I have a text file containing a list of stock items
>> each line contains the number in stock followed by a tab followed by the
>> name of the item. I need to implement something that reads in the text
>> file and outputs the stock list in ascending or descending order of
>> quantity.
>
> Nice problem. Easy but non-trivial.
>
>> Please note I am NOT asking for solutions.
>
> Ok. With some inefficient redundancy, I believe it could be done in one
> line in Python. Better code would take a few more.
>
>> In bash this is laughably trivial
>>
>> sort -nr $1 | head -${2:-10}
>
> Won't sort work alphabetically and leave the following as is?
>
> 1\talpha
> 11\tbeta
> 2\tgamma
>
The commandline options are "-nr". "n" means compare numerically and
"r" means reverse order.