Sorting a list in Python using the result from sorting another list [duplicate]

Answer 1

@Ignacio's answer is the best, but just in case you need to sort the lists in-place without making new lists, you can try this:

import itertools
list_enumerate = itertools.count()

list_2.sort(reverse=True, key=lambda k: list_1[next(list_enumerate)])
list_1.sort(reverse=True)
print list_1
print list_2

Note that I do not think there is any guarantee that the key function is called for each list item in order (which is necessary for this to work), so this is a risky method to use.