[urisagit/Sort-Maker.git] / paper / abstract

A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting

Uri Guttman, John Porter, and Larry Rosler

Abstract

Sorting is one of the primary needs of programming, because most
programs produce reports of sorted data.  Efficient sorting therefore
receives a great deal of attention in the Perl documentation, FAQ,
FMTYEWTK, books, and newsgroups.  In this paper, we review and compare
several methods for Perl sorting:  external ('system'),
repeatedly-computed-keys ('naive'), cached-keys ('Orcish Maneuver'), and
mapped-keys ('Schwartz Transform').  We then present a little-known
approach ('single-string key-and-value'), which relies for efficiency on
the default sort algorithm.  This method typically provides much better
performance than the other approaches, and is easy to implement directly
or using a module.
Commit	Line	Data
7468c584	1	A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting
	2
	3	Uri Guttman, John Porter, and Larry Rosler
	4
	5	Abstract
	6
	7	Sorting is one of the primary needs of programming, because most
	8	programs produce reports of sorted data. Efficient sorting therefore
	9	receives a great deal of attention in the Perl documentation, FAQ,
	10	FMTYEWTK, books, and newsgroups. In this paper, we review and compare
	11	several methods for Perl sorting: external ('system'),
	12	repeatedly-computed-keys ('naive'), cached-keys ('Orcish Maneuver'), and
	13	mapped-keys ('Schwartz Transform'). We then present a little-known
	14	approach ('single-string key-and-value'), which relies for efficiency on
	15	the default sort algorithm. This method typically provides much better
	16	performance than the other approaches, and is easy to implement directly
	17	or using a module.
	18
	19
	20