On approximately 7/5/2004 5:33 PM, came the following characters from the keyboard of david nicol: > I am wondering if I was somehow unclear in my proposed algorithm, > archived at > > http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-06/msg00592.html > > which describes both bubble and inserting to place new elements in the > short list. The algorithm seemed clear enough to me, but I couldn't figure out why you were interested in dealing with the short list.... if the bubble or heap sort on the long list returns data in sorted order, which it should, then push @short_list, &next_elem_from_incremental_sort(); should be adequate and optimal for putting data into the short list. This is sufficiently trivial that additional or alternative algorithms are not particularly interesting to me. The interesting part of the job is figuring out how to pull the sorted data out of the long list without doing a complete sort, and without paying inordinate overhead needed by some fast sort algorithms, which are definitely worthwhile when sorting the whole list, but are not nearly as worthwhile when only needing a few elements. -- Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/ =========================== The best part about procrastination is that you are never bored, because you have all kinds of things that you should be doing.