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
