Stringifying the array can lead to incorrect results in some cases. Consider the following: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use Digest::MD5 qw( md5 );

my @a1 = ( 'aa', 'a', '' );
print '[', join( '|', @a1 ), "]\n";
my $d1 = md5( @a1 );

my @sorted_a1 = sort @a1;
print '[', join( '|', @sorted_a1 ), "]\n";
my $sorted_d1 = md5( @sorted_a1 );

printf( "Digests are %s\n",
        ( $d1 eq $sorted_d1 ) ? 'equal' : 'unequal' );

[download]
Prints: 
[aa|a|]
[|a|aa]
Digests are equal

[download]

In this case, the elements in the array were completely reversed by the sort but the md5 digest was identical.

This is (partly) documented in the docs for Digest::MD5:

The result of md5("a", "b", "c") will be exactly the same as the result of md5("abc").

In reply to Re: Fast way to check if a sort was done (using stringification is *broken*) by bobf
in thread Fast way to check if a sort was doen by Outaspace

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