in reply to Inertion sort in perl

...because in a string comparison, '2' is not less than '10'  (comparison happens character-wise, and '2' is not smaller than '1' (ascii-betically)) 

my $n = 10;
for my $i (1..$n) {
    printf "'%s lt %s' is %s\n", $i, $n, $i lt $n ? "true":"false";
}
__END__
'1 lt 10' is true
'2 lt 10' is false
'3 lt 10' is false
'4 lt 10' is false
'5 lt 10' is false
'6 lt 10' is false
'7 lt 10' is false
'8 lt 10' is false
'9 lt 10' is false
'10 lt 10' is false

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(Tip: change $n to 11 in the above snippet and note that '10 lt 11' is true in contrast to most others...)

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Re^2: Insertion sort in perl
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Apr 25, 2009 at 13:26 UTC
    And as an example of the two different types of ordering (i.e., the default lexicographic-ascending of sort vs. numeric ascending), consider: 
    >perl -wMstrict -le
"my @unsorted = (1, 10, 100, 11, 9, 3, 5, 2);
 my @lexic_sorted = sort @unsorted;
 print qq{@lexic_sorted};
 my @numeric_sorted = sort { $a <=> $b } @unsorted;
 print qq{@numeric_sorted};
"
1 10 100 11 2 3 5 9
1 2 3 5 9 10 11 100

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