On Fri, Jul 20, 2001 at 09:01:55AM -0700, Paul wrote:
> I don't know the behavior for certain on a final return of zero, but I
> don't think it does anything, which likely means that later things may
> or may not reverse their order based on comparisons of other pairs, so
> that the end result is unpredictable.
You were doing great, until you got to here, where you got a little
confusing. A final return of zero indicates $a and $b are equal. This
means they will bunch together, and in the current implementation of sort
(5.6.1's) they will stay in the same position they had in the original list
(sort algorithms that do this are known as stable).
The results of the sort is entirely predictable because the comparison
subroutines returns consistent results.
Michael
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