I don't follow your reasoning.

We were talking at cross purposes. I thought that you were proposing to heap sort the entire dataset, not the subset of smallest elements.

I admit that my using sort to order the smallest subset is a hack, but unless N is large or the comparison function is expensive, it will be faster than a pure-perl heap.

As for overkill, using Perl to solve a problem that can be solved with the correct option to the Unix sort utility is overkill. But if you need a general purpose solution in Perl and you have a heap implementation there already, why not use it?

I don't see how the Unix sort applies. We don't want to sort the whole dataset - we want the smallest N elements (and we also don't know if the dataset consists of line oriented data.)

In reply to Re^5: Heap sorting in perl by adrianh
in thread Heap sorting in perl by blakem

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