If You Love Queuing, Will You Also Love Priority Queuing? * [Club]

"You provide three tiers to your customers: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. And one of the perks of the higher tiers is priority over the others when your customers need you. Gold customers get served first. When no Gold customers are waiting, you serve Silver customers. Bronze customers get served when there's no one in the upper tiers waiting. How do you set up this queue in your Python program?"

"Sure, you could keep three separate lists (or better still, three `deque` objects). But that's not fun! And what if you had more than three priority categories? Perhaps a continuous range of priorities rather than a discrete number? There's a Python tool for this! So let's start coding. First, create the data structure to hold the customer names in the queue: "You told me there's a special tool for this? But this is just a bog-standard list, Stephen!!""

Three customer tiers — Gold, Silver, Bronze — require that higher-tier customers receive service before lower-tier customers. Implement the queue by storing items that pair a numeric priority with a customer name, using lower numbers for higher priority (e.g., Gold=1, Silver=2, Bronze=3). Use Python's heapq module to maintain a heap-based priority queue on a list; push and pop tuples to ensure minimal-priority items are returned first. This approach generalizes to arbitrary numbers or continuous ranges of priorities and avoids managing multiple separate queues while preserving efficient insertion and retrieval.

Read at Thepythoncodingstack