Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Creating a class that has orderable objects

We often need objects that can be sorted into order. Log records are often ordered by date and time. When simulating card games, it's often essential to be able to sort the Card objects into a defined order. When cards form a sequence, sometimes called a straight, this can be an important way to score points. This is part of games such as Poker, Cribbage, and Pinochle.

Most of our class definitions have not included the features necessary for sorting objects into order. Many of the recipes have kept objects in mappings or sets based on the internal hash value computed by the __hash__() method, and an equality test defined by the __eq__() method.

In order to keep items in a sorted collection, we'll need the comparison methods that implement <, >, <=, and >=. These are in addition to == and !=. These comparisons are all based on the attribute values of each object and are distinct for every class we might define...