Afanasiy:[color=blue]
> Why wouldn't [ksort] be a standard function?[/color]
Because it isn't needed all that often and can be built (when needed)
from the underlying primitives very simply. Because if there are a
lot of similar methods then it becomes harder to remember what each
one does.
The normal practice is
keys = d.keys()
keys.sort()
for k in keys:
....
which isn't all that onerous.
[color=blue]
> How about this one?
>
>
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.asort.php[/color]
The normal idiom for sorting by value then printing
the key/value pairs is
rev_items = [(v, k) for k, v in d.items()]
rev_items.sort()
for v, k in rev_items:
print k, v
If you want that as a function return just the keys
in value order
def asort(d):
rev_items = [(v, k) for k, v in d.items()]
rev_items.sort()
return [k for (v, k) in rev_items]
As you can see, there are many ways you might want
to sort a dict. Why should all of them be present in
the standard dict type when it's really a matter of two
extra lines to get what you need. Seeing the code in
this case is much easier than memorizing the 7 different
sort functions mentioned in the PHP docs.
Additionally, Python's keys can be more complex than
a string or int. Eg,
d = {}
d[ (0,0) ] = "home"
d[ (1,3) ] = "school"
d[ (4,2) ] = "work"
y_items = [(y, name) for ((x, y), name) in d.items()]
y_items.sort()
for y, name in y_items:
print y, name
sorts by y position, ignoring x position. PHP doesn't
have a function for that, but it follows pretty naturally
from the idiomatically Python way to do it.
Andrew
dalke@dalkescientific.com 
