Word Aligned

In the previous article I noted that Python’sheapq module is theonly part of standard Python I could think of which deals with sorting,but which doesn’t give you full control over the sort order.
That means you need to take care when using a heapq as a priority queue....

Suppose you have an list of distinct elements which has been sortedand rotated. How would you look up an element within that list?
For example, the list:
is sorted (the first 7 primes, in order) and rotated (to put 7 first).

Recently I attended a demonstration of a product intended to help design software, right down to implementation details. It failed to convince me. It did, however, succeed in reminding me of this short work by Jorge Luis Borges:
On Exactitude in Science...

A quick note on some useful updates made to standard Python maths support. Math.prod does for * what sum does for +. It was added at Python 3.8.
Added in 3.9, math.lcm, returns the least common multiple of its integer arguments. As with math.prod, an empty list of arguments returns 1. Extended in 3.9, the related function math.gcd now accepts an arbitrary list of arguments....