Hey monks, Can you tell me how to improve this sort? We thought about Perl's sort function but a bubble sort seemed to be correct for this. We needed to address nesting of string values as well as regular ordering. What do you think? 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;


my @v;
$v[0]=via_format(1,2);
$v[1]=via_format(1,12);
$v[2]=via_format(1,4);
$v[3]=via_format(6,12);
$v[4]=via_format(1,5);
&printV;

for (my $swapping = 1; $swapping >= 0; $swapping--) {
    for (my $j=0; $j < $#v; $j++ ) {
        if ( (index($v[$j],$v[$j+1]) >= 0)       || 
             (length($v[$j+1]) < length($v[$j])) ||
             ($v[$j+1] lt $v[$j] && length($v[$j+1]) <= length($v[$j])
+) ) {
              @v[$j,$j+1] = @v[$j+1,$j];
              $swapping   = 1;
        } 
    }
}


&printV;

sub printV {
   my $i;
   print "----------------------\n";
   for ($i=0; $i <= $#v; $i++) {
      print $v[$i] . "\n";
   }
}


sub via_format {
   my $a = shift;
   my $b = shift;
   return join('+', map{sprintf("%02d", $_)} ($a..$b) );

}

[download]
Thanks.

In reply to Funky sorting by Anonymous Monk

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