Hello,
say, we want to find the k'th element in a sorted list.
In imperative languages it is much more efficient
to not use quicksort first and get the k'th element later,
but to use a quicksearch algorithm that sorts only
the relevant parts of the array.
In Haskell one could implement this
I left my copy of Chris Okasaki's Functional Data Structures at home,
but I seem to recall (vaguely) that his heap sort algorithm was best for
sorting/searching the first k elements of an orderable sequence.
If you don't have a copy of this book, you should definitely get one. It
is his
