How to efficiently compare two unordered lists (not sets) in Python?

Question

a = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
b = [3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1]

a & b should be considered equal, because they have exactly the same elements, only in different

Answer 1

Let a,b lists

def ass_equal(a,b):
try:
    map(lambda x: a.pop(a.index(x)), b) # try to remove all the elements of b from a, on fail, throw exception
    if len(a) == 0: # if a is empty, means that b has removed them all
        return True 
except:
    return False # b failed to remove some items from a

No need to make them hashable or sort them.