defining a function to see if a list is sorted

[ichabod801]

A note on looping through consecutive items of a list:

for first, second in zip(the_list, the_list[1:]):
    if first > second:
        return False
return True

That does give a performance hit because you are creating a new list. For small lists that shouldn't be a big issue. If large lists are a possibility you can use islice from itertools.