Explicitly raise an exception in __cmp__ -- this clarifies that cmp()

is not supported on sets.  (Unfortunately, sorting a list of sets may
still return random results because it uses < exclusively, but for
sets that inly implements a partial ordering.  Oh well.)

2 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Lib/sets.py b/Lib/sets.py
index 2605c98..6d2c032 100644
--- a/Lib/sets.py
+++ b/Lib/sets.py
@@ -102,6 +102,11 @@ class BaseSet(object):
         """
         return self._data.iterkeys()
 
+    # Three-way comparison is not supported
+
+    def __cmp__(self, other):
+        raise TypeError, "can't compare sets using cmp()"
+
     # Equality comparisons using the underlying dicts
 
     def __eq__(self, other):
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 5f415d4..29411ec 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -78,6 +78,10 @@ Extension modules
 Library
 -------
 
+- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
+  sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
+  operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
+
 - Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled.  These modules are not safe in
   Python 2.2. or 2.3.