I suggest making Enum members orderable, according to their order in the enum type. Currently trying to order them raises an exception:

    >>> import enum
    >>> class Number(enum.Enum):
    ...     one = 1
    ...     two = 2
    ...     three = 3
    >>> sorted((Number.one, Number.two))
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<pyshell#2>", line 1, in <module>
        sorted((Number.one, Number.two))
    TypeError: unorderable types: Number() < Number()

If there's agreement from core developers that this is a good feature to add, I'll write a patch.

On Sep 27, 2014, at 02:28 PM, Ram Rachum wrote:

>I suggest making Enum members orderable, according to their order in the enum
>type.

Can you please provide a motivating use case?

Why don't you use IntEnum?

Just because I want to be able to get the `int` value of an enum object, doesn't mean I want the enum object to *be* an `int`, which is what `IntEnum` means. I don't want it to be comparable to an int, I don't want to use arithmetic on it, and most importantly I don't want it to be equal to an enum object of a different type that happens to have the same int.

On Sep 27, 2014, at 03:35 PM, Ram Rachum wrote:

>Just because I want to be able to get the `int` value of an enum object,
>doesn't mean I want the enum object to *be* an `int`, which is what `IntEnum`
>means. I don't want it to be comparable to an int, I don't want to use
>arithmetic on it, and most importantly I don't want it to be equal to an enum
>object of a different type that happens to have the same int.

Okay, but that still doesn't explain the use case.  Also, why wouldn't an Enum
subclass, possibly using the ordered dictionary __members__ would not be
sufficient.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/enum.html#orderedenum

My particular use case is that I have objects with a tuple of enum objects to each, and I want the tuple to be in canonical order rather than random, for convenience.

I can easily use a subclass, but I think it's general enough functionality for it to be included in the standard library.

Enums have a definition order to aid in the use-case of auto-numbering, and to make displays consistent.  However, the basic Enum type is unordered.

If you need/want your particular enum type to be ordered, mix-in the ordered magic methods.