If you'll grant me an audience knowing that I know a bit about the Schwartzian Transform... {grin}

The ST makes sense only when the orderingfunction on each element to be sorted is expensive to compute, and should therefore be cached to prevent multiple calls (so the list has to be long enough as well). Since "array lookup" is a cheap (nearly free) orderingfunction, the ST is far too much overkill on this choice.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker