[Python-Dev] Cleaning-up the new unittest API (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Nov 2 23:33:39 CET 2010

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:

I can't help thinking that most of this confusion is caused by using < for determining subsets. If < were not defined for sets and people had to use "set.issubset" (which exists already), then sorting a list with sets would raise an exception, a much more understandable failure mode than getting back a list in arbitrary order.

Personally I think it was premature to throw out cmp.

What should have happened instead is for cmp to be augmented with a fourth outcome, "not equal but unordered". Then operations such as sorting that require a total ordering could use cmp and complain if they get an unordered result.

-- Greg

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