Re: Numeric sorting WITHOUT <=>

[BillKSmith]

in reply to Numeric sorting WITHOUT <=>

Here is one bad way to do it! No comparisons at all.

use strict;
use warnings;
my %jetsons = (
    7  => 'Judy',
    10 => 'Jane',
    11 => 'George',
    2  => 'Elroy',
    100=> 'Rosey',
    1  => 'Astro',
    19 => 'Mr. Spacely',
    22 => 'Mr. Cogswell'
);
for my $i (0..100) {
    print "$i => $jetsons{$i}\n" if exists $jetsons{$i};
}

[Anonymous Monk]

One may not know the minimum & maximum values without inspecting to use range operator, so ...

use strict; use warnings;

use List::MoreUtils 'minmax';

my %hash = ( ... );

#  Absurdity is to find end values in order to avoid
#  numeric comparison.
my ( $min , $max ) = minmax keys %hash;

for my $i ( $min .. $max )
{
  ...
}

[Marshall]

Yes, this is indeed a "bad way" to do it! Compared with sort(), this will be slow (20..99) yield no result and it doesn't scale well. And I guess that you would in the general case, have to read every key to find the maximum key value.