If that's what's happening, yes. I read his message as "I have a loop that goes 1000 times, and each time it generates a bunch of data. I want the largest value produced from each run of the loop, ie, 1000 largest values," which wouldn't work from your model. Also, it's almost certain to be less efficient (O(n log n) instead of O(n) to do the sort, then throw away all the extra sort data that was just computed).