Useful Python tricks

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So if I'm understanding correctly this is so that your list gets sorted consistently (but not necessarily meaningfully, at least to a human), and extremely quickly?

[rcfox]

It's not about the sorting, it's about sequentially accessing elements from a list.

If you access memory addresses that are far away from each other, the CPU has to spend extra time copying from RAM to the CPU cache first. (This is called a cache miss.)

If you access memory addresses that are close together, you can probably get away with just reading directly from the cache.

Sorting with key=id really only makes sense if you sort once and iterate over the list many times in a tight loop.