There are six equality/relationship methods. They represent what happens if an object is compared using any of the following symbols:

Let's illustrate this function with an example based on our prior case—a Person class. We'll add a function that will allow us to sort characters by their age:

class Person:
    '''person entity'''

    def __init__(self, name, surname, age):
        self.name = name
        self.surname = surname
        self.age = age
    
    def __repr__(self):
        return f'Person(name={self.name}, surname={self.surname}, age={self.age})'        

    def __lt__(self, other):
        return self.age < other.age

Now, let's use the same characters:

data = [
    {'name':"Pippi", 'surname':'Longstocking', 'age':11},
    {'name':"Kalle", 'surname':'Blomkvist', 'age':10},
    {'name':'Karlsson', 'surname': 'on-the-Roof', 'age':12}
]

characters = [Person(**row) for row in data]

Finally, we'll sort our characters. Under the hood, the sorting function uses the smaller method:

>>> sorted(characters)
[Person(name=Kalle, surname=Blomkvist, age=10),
 Person(name=Pippi, surname=Longstocking, age=11),
 Person(name=Karlsson, surname=on-the-Roof, age=12)]