[Python-Dev] PEP 326 (quick location possibility) (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Thu Jan 29 10:24:27 EST 2004

Indeed, I had a bug within the past few years in a find-the-minimum search loop, using an initial value 10x larger than anything I thought I'd ever see. A few months later, the inputs in one case happened all to be larger than that, so it returned the bogus initial value as if it were a sensible result. Hilarity ensued. There are few enough bugs in my code at this age that I take very seriously any principled gimmick that could prevent repeating one.

Alex Martelli had proposed extending the key= idea to min() and max(). The idea is to let those functions completely encapsulate the logic of searching for minimum and maximum elements:

bestplayer = min(players, key=attrgetter('points'))

This would work equally well with other objective functions.

Raymond Hettinger

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