Re: [Fwd: Re: [FWP] sorting text in human-order]

[Jarkko Hietaniemi]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 06:36:56PM -0600, David L. Nicol wrote:
> 
> Is there a perl6 sort committee yet?  AFter reading Cawley's
> method here, I wonder if using it we could make radix-sorts the
> default sort method.

Radix sorts are great if the data cooperates, radix sorts can really
fly in such conditions -- but this is not always the case: radix sorts
require that you have an unambiguous rule for mapping all the keys to
a flat fixed-length 'namespace'.  Take, for example your usual strings
of practically unlimited length.  You can't define a (non-lossy and
non-colliding) rule to map them to, say, fixed-length integers.

Therefore and thusly: we aim for pluggable sort algorithms.

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