Or we might take your example of sorting. Perls sort is generic, its intended to be fast for the "average" data sets and cases. It turns out that the version used in some versions of perl has some _really_ bad cases however, and so it has been changed (isn't even quicksort anymore iirc).

Well, in 5.8.0, the default is mergesort; however, quicksort is still available on demand. But if you select quicksort, a trick will be performed to make it unlikely to hit one of the cases where quicksort behaves quadratic: large arrays will first be shuffled.

Anyway, the point is that in Perl its easy to just use sort to sort things. But in some situations it may not be advisable to do so. For instance it wouldnt make sense IMO to use sort if you were only adding one value and putting it in order. I might use binary search with splice, or even a single pass of a bubble sort if the list was small.

Actually one of the decisions for using the current implementation of mergesort was to be able to deal well with nearly sorted lists. The mergesort in Perl is faster if there are longer runs of sorted, or reversely sorted, elements. So, in 5.8.0, it does make sense to push an element on a sorted array, and then sort that list, instead of using a binary search and splice. Both operations will be linear (!), but the former will do almost everything in C.

Abigail