On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 12:16:08AM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
I hear that Perl development version 5.7 has merge sort. Does anybody have
details?
Yes, there's mergesort, the builtin sort() now uses mergesort
(as opposed to earlier quicksort).
The main reason for migration: mergesort never has a bad day, while
quicksort easily has such. Both implementation we had/have are highly
tuned (not your garden variety implementations), and they were
benchmarked, the quicksort slightly winning on very short lists, but
overall, merge won.
But sort() is of course still in-memory, so no win for Perl there.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
