I would expect the Schwartzian Transform to be slower when the number of items is small, the computation of the secondary key is very easy, and maybe in some pathological cases. That's how we teach it in our "Intermediate Perl" class; we make the students benchmark it. It's the subject of Wasting time thinking about wasted time.

Uri Guttman and Larry Rosler spent a lot of time thinking about sorting and wrote a nice paper on the subject that includes about every method they could find.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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In reply to Re: Underestimage (ST vs brute force) by brian_d_foy
in thread Underestimage (ST vs brute force) by Tanktalus

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