Comparison of strings is lexicographically-sensitive

Source: Dev.to

Day 78 – December 2nd, 2025

I need to buckle down, as I’m still lagging on day 3 & 4 goals (“Day 3‑4: Control structures (if‑else, loops)”), as well as day 5 (and 6) goals (“Day 5‑6: Functions and modules”), and Day 7 target (exercises). If I haven’t covered this, I can’t make progress on day 8‑77 goals.

Goals

As extracted from the Python for Software Development textbook by Halvorsen (n.d.):

• Plotting in Python ✅
• Subplots ✅
• Exercises ✅
• If … Else
• Arrays
• For Loops
• Nested For Loops
• While Loops
• Exercises
• Creating Functions in Python – Introduction
• Functions with multiple return values
• Exercises
• Creating Classes in Python
• The __init__() Function
• Exercises
• Creating Python Modules
• Exercises

Notes

Python for Data Science, AI & Development Course (IBM) (Santarcangelo, n.d.) – Module 2: Python Programming Fundamentals – Conditions and Branching

• The block of code under an if statement only runs when the condition is True.
• Comparison of strings is lexicographically‑sensitive (comparison is done character‑by‑character based on Unicode/ASCII ordering) (see also Google, 2025a; Google, 2025b). That’s why "10" comes before "2" when compared as strings.

References

• Google. (2025b). Google Search with AI. [Large language model].
• Halvorsen, H. (n.d.). Python.
• Santarcangelo, J. (n.d.). Python for data science, AI & development [MOOC]. Coursera.