The Python array is designed to emulate the behavior of an array in C, and it’s meant chiefly to allow Python to work with C arrays. The array type is useful in those cases, but in almost every ...

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 ...