Ah, the bubble sort. Every computer science student loves it for it's simplicity, and hates it for it's unbelievable innefficiency. This example of a bubble sort takes an array ref and sorts the array in-place, from low to high. The array should be only numbers, no strings or other sneaky stuff.

Usage: bbl_sort(\@array);

For the curious, sorting a 10,000 element array of unique numbers on my 1.2 Ghz Athlon takes about 3 minutes on a randomized array. The worst-case-scenario, with all of the numbers backwards (i.e., 40, 39, ..., 0), takes a few minutes more. About an hour ago I set the computer to task on a 100,000 element array of unique numbers that had been randomly mixed up, and it is still going.


sub bbl_sort {
    my $array = shift;
    my $not_complete = 1;
    my $index;
    my $len = ((scalar @$array) - 2);
    while ($not_complete) {
        $not_complete = 0;
        foreach $index (0 .. $len) {
            if (@$array[$index] > @$array[$index + 1]) {
                my $temp = @$array[$index + 1];
                @$array[$index + 1] = @$array[$index];
                @$array[$index] = $temp;
                $not_complete = 1;
            }
        }
    }
}

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In reply to Simple bubble sort by IndyZ

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