Re^3: Numeric sorting WITHOUT <=>

[ikegami]

sort uses mergesort by default, not quicksort. That could be a more appropriate choice?

Your last snippet has a memory leak.

[tobyink]

Mergesort is more complex to implement I think, though not massively so. Perl did once use quicksort, but it was changed in 5.8. The old sorting algorithm can be enabled using:

use sort '_quicksort';

Memory leak... indeed. Is it too early to be getting sick of pre-5.16 Perls? In practice you'd probably give the sub a name so this wouldn't be an issue.

[ikegami]

Actually, a naïve merge sort is dead simple. Quite possibly the easiest to explain, too.

sub mergesort {
   return $_[0] if @_ == 1;

   my $i = int( @_ / 2 );
   my @a = mergesort(@_[0..$i-1]);
   my @b = mergesort(@_[$i..$#_]);

   my @sorted;
   while (@a && @b) {
      if    ($a[0] < $b[0]) { push @sorted, shift(@a);            }
      elsif ($b[0] < $a[0]) { push @sorted, shift(@b);            }
      else                  { push @sorted, shift(@a), shift(@b); }
   }

   return ( @sorted, @a, @b );
}

lol! I got two 5.8.8 question this week. It'll be a while before it's ok to be sick of 5.14.