And you'll notice, it still has to process the whole list on the first pass, so lazy lists don't really come into play.
Yes, lazy lists are what make the whole scheme elegant. The sort returns a lazy list of values, which is nothing more than a thunk, a promise to do some work in the future (i.e. there is no computation done, and there are no elements sitting around in memory). When you end up needing the value in @sorted[0] that thunk is evaluated (you get the minimal value in O(n) time). And when you need @sorted[1] you get that in another O(log(n)) time. Etc. You might want to check out the lazy language Haskell for all kinds of funky stuff that can be done lazily (and all perl monks know the value of Laziness!)
-- All code is 100% tested and functional unless otherwise noted.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|
