The body of your second version of __init__() in one line: self.min, self.max = sorted((min, max)) This may be what was meant with the sentence that claims "b

The body of your second version of __init__() in one line: self.min, self.max = sorted((min, max)) This may be what was meant with the sentence that claims "but eventually you'll need a line like this outside of init" but I'm not sure what that part means. (I generally support functional programming practices, which Python leaves a lot of room for). Or, you could subclass tuple.