[derriz]

Am I missing something? In the paper the definition of cmp3 on page 2 seems to have a bug - as defined, wouldn't cmp3([1,2,3], [1]) return 0?

    # Uses 3-way cmp() for primitives
    def cmp3(a, b):
        if not isinstance(a, list):
            global c; c += 1
            return cmp(a, b) 
        for x, y in zip(a, b):
            r = cmp3(x, y)
            if r != 0: 
                return r 
        return 0

This isn't generally the expected behaviour for comparing lists, surely?

[mehrdadn]

Oh yeah I think you did find a bug, thanks for pointing it out! I need to check the lengths as well. It shouldn't affect the conclusion (in fact I think I made all comparisons equal-length in the paper?) but I should revise it when I get the chance.

[rav]

Seems like you can fix this by changing return 0 to return cmp(len(a), len(b)).