Arrays in Python give you a huge amount of flexibility for storing, organizing, and accessing data. This is crucial, not least because of Python’s popularity for use in data science.

As an FYI, nosferatu-man's and my solutions are better than S. Carton's, but require Python 2.4. The "key" parameter to sort/sorted does a "Decorate-Sort-Undecorate" [1] automatically, whereas the ...