* Ken Y. Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I don't know how many values you need to sort, but it's probably > advisable to use a Schwartzian Transform. Here's my suggestion:
Which in turn may be slower than a new sorting method: http://www.sysarch.com/perl/sort_paper.html "Sorting can be a major bottleneck in Perl programs. Performance can vary by orders of magnitude, depending on how the sort is written. In this paper, we examine Perlīs sort function in depth and describe how to use it with simple and complex data. Next we analyze and compare several well-known Perl sorting optimizations (including the Orcish Maneuver and the Schwartzian Transform). We then show how to improve their performance significantly, by packing multiple sortkeys into a single string. Finally, we present a fresh approach, using the sort function with packed sortkeys and without a sortsub. This performs much better than any of the other methods, and is easy to implement directly or by using a new module we created, Sort::Records."
