in reply to Returning the lowest key in a hash (or highest)

Sort takes O(n log n). Simply walking the keys of the hash is only O(n). 
my ($min, undef) = each %hash;
$min > $_ and $min = $_ for keys %hash;

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Updated: Fixed that bug...:)

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Re: Returning the lowest key in a hash (or highest)
by Dominus (Parson) on Mar 25, 2001 at 20:11 UTC
    Says indigo:
    Sort takes O(n log n). Simply walking the keys of the hash is only O(n).
    A lot of people made this point, but I wonder if it's really as important as people think. sort() is written in C and is very fast. Walking the keys requires that a lot of Perl opcodes must be dispatched, so it is probably a lot slower. Yes, the times are O(n log n) and O(n), but that ignores the constant factors, and I would expect the constant factor for the sort to be much smaller, so that the sort would be faster except for extremely large hashes.

    Maybe someone who likes benchmarking can look into this and post the results.

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      Here's a benchmark I tried that compares sorting to hash-walking for hashes of various sizes, and the results confirm Dominus's expectations. The hash entries are generated using rand(65000) and both subs are given the same hash to work with. (I think the comparison is pretty fair, let me know if you have ideas for either of the subs!)

      The code: 

      sub walkit {
   my $hashref = shift;
   my $min = each %$hashref;
   $min > $_ and $min = $_ for keys %$hashref;
   $min;
}

sub sortit {
   my $hashref = shift;
   ( sort {$a<=>$b} keys %$hashref )[0];
}

      [download]

      The results: 

      Size       sort       walk
10      8329.50/s  5289.68/s  (sort wins!)
100     1020.53/s   727.29/s  (sort wins!)
1000      94.68/s    80.14/s  (sort wins!)
10000      7.15/s     7.31/s  (almost a wash...)
100000     0.52/s     0.73/s  (walking wins!)

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Re: Re: Returning the lowest key in a hash (or highest)
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 25, 2001 at 03:35 UTC
    Except for the fact that since you initialized $min to 0, it will stay at 0 even if there's no 0 in the hash!
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