I have two numeric values with the names a and b.

I want to assign the name low to the smaller value and the name high to the larger value.
What's the pythonic way to do this?

I considered

low, high = sorted([a, b])

but that seems overkill.

CodePudding user response：

Why would it be overkill? sorted is explicit, efficient and concise.

Just use: low, high = sorted([a, b])

CodePudding user response：

You can use a ternary conditional expression and tuple unpacking.

low, high = (a, b) if a < b else (b, a)

CodePudding user response：

The sorted function has time complexity O(n log n) in worst case.

For small lists, this means it is very efficient. low, high = sorted([a, b]) is not overkill.

Alternatively, use a conditional expression: low, high = (a, b) if a < b else (b, a)