Ruby » Ruby master

Feature #1089

Updated by jonathanhefner (Jonathan Hefner) almost 5 years ago

=begin 
  
  I'd like to have stable sorting in Ruby. Stable sorting means that if two items are ==, they will retain their order in the list after sorting. In other words, stable sort does never switch two equal items. 
 
  In Ruby 1.9.1, you'd have to use something like 
 
    enum.sort_by.with_index { |a, i| [a, i] } 
 
  to achieve a stable sort in Ruby. 
 
  It would also be nice to minimize the number of comparisons, since method calling is expensive in Ruby. 
 
  Python is using a highly optimized implementation of a variant of merge sort, which is stable and uses very few comparisons (called Timsort after Tim Peters); maybe Ruby can adopt it for sort and sort_by: 
 
    http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Objects/listsort.txt 
 
  Introducing stable sorting would not be a problem for old code because the order of equal items after sorting is currently not specified. 
 
 =end 
 

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