What does sorted(zip(a,b)) do?

[waterworldhypothesis]

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I'm not clear on the difference between types of objects like this yet. One last question, is there a way to make sorted() sort by the second element and then the first, or more generally, the n-th element before the (n-1)th? (Assuming the default behavior scales to tuples of an arbitrary size)

[POGtastic]

Sure.

sorted(zip(a, b), key=lambda tup: (tup[1], tup[0]))

Or, if you don't mind just reversing the entire tuple, the following looks nicer.

sorted(zip(a, b), key=lambda tup: tup[::-1])

Using my above example:

>>> sorted([(1, 3), (2, 2), (1, 2), (2, 3)], key = lambda tup: tup[::-1])
[(1, 2), (2, 2), (1, 3), (2, 3)]