http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=891962


in reply to Re^2: how sort works
in thread how sort works

Do you know whether Perl's mergesort has borrowed a lot of ideas from Python's timsort?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: how sort works
by JavaFan (Canon) on Mar 08, 2011 at 10:19 UTC
    I do not think so. John P. Linderman ported a C implementation of "Optimistic Merge Sort" by Peter M. Mcilroy to Perl. The comment in pp_sort.c says that this was presented at SODA '92, but that seems a typo. The ACM portal claims it was SODA '93. Citation. The article itself is downloadable - for a fee.

    Now it may very well be that timsort implemented the same algorithm, but I do not recall ever hearing any reference to timsort on the p5p mailing list.