its not clear to me if this is still true in 5.8

Perl 5.8 defaults to mergesort on most platforms, though quicksort is still available through use sort '_quicksort';.

The mergesort algorithm does not have the nasty worst case performance which bit demerphq. It guarantees to run in O(NlogN) time. It is also stable, meaning that items which compare equal in the sort retain their order in the result. Its disadvantage is that it uses O(N) memory for temporary storage.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: Bitten by the worst case (or why it pays to know whats inside the black box) by Zaxo
in thread Bitten by the worst case (or why it pays to know whats inside the black box) by demerphq

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