Don't you just want to create the subroutine on the fly and wrap it in something that you can give to sort?

For each piece of the sort you have a little subroutine that tries just that piece. Store all those little subroutines in an array. You'll call them in order and return their value unless they return 0, in which case you try the next subroutine reference in the array. 

my $sort_sub = do {
my @subs = ... stuff to build array

sub {
    foreach my $sub ( @subs )
       {
       my $result = $sub->();
       return $result if $result;
       }
    };

};

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Update: Duh. $a and $b are globals so I don't need to pass them in the sort subroutine.
--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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In reply to Re: Building a sorting subroutine on the fly by brian_d_foy
in thread Building a sorting subroutine on the fly by jkeenan1

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