Tim Peters wrote: > [/T] >>> OTOH, current versions of Python (and Perl) > > [/F] >> just curious, but all this use of (& Perl) mean that the Perl folks have >> implemented timsort ? > > A remarkable case of independent harmonic convergence: > > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026946.html > > Come to think of it, I don't actually know whether a /released/ Perl > ever contained the development code I saw. Looks like it got added to > Perl 5.8: > > http://perldoc.perl.org/sort.html > The difference in style between Perl and Python is quite interesting: Perl lets you specify the algorithm which you think it going to be best for your code, but in a global manner which means your pragmas may or may not have the desired effect (which sounds a headache for maintenance). Python simply gets on with the job.
What the perl docs don't say though is whether they do any of the fancy timsort optimisations. I guess not, or at least not all of them: the Perl docs warn that mergesort can be much slower if there are a lot of duplicates, and from the Python dev thread above we can see that early timsort was also much slower for that case (~sort) but in the final version there is no effective difference. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
