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The heapq documentation isn't very clear about its requirements. It
does explicitly say that "Heaps are arrays for which heap[k] <=
heap[2*k+1] and heap[k] <= heap[2*k+2] for all k, counting elements from
zero." (this in the module reference for the heapq module, both in the
Python 2.5 version and the in-development version) which might lead one
to believe that <= (__le__) is the important operation. I don't know
where it is documented that heapq behaves the same as sort(). I think
the documentation needs some improvement to avoid this kind of
confusion. It's very hard, often impossible, to know what is an
"accidental and erroneous implementation detail" and what is a stable,
public API.
Also, I'm not sure why the code is being changed to accomodate newly
written applications which never could have worked, breaking existing
applications which did work, but I suppose that's just the decision
CPython developers want to make.