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From: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Is Perl's sort stable?
Keywords: sort, perl
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.224701.9318@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 91 22:47:01 GMT
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Reply-To: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 13

Is Perl's sort stable?  By that I mean if I have a list of 6 char long scalers,
and ask sort to sort by the last 3 letters and then again by the first 3 will
I have the same effect as if I had sorted by all six in the same place?  (I am
asking because I have data sorted by date given in a messy date format, and
I want to sort by user name but preserve the secondary sorting by date...  I
could solve the problem without assuming Perl's sort is stable, but why go to
all that extra work if Perl does do a stable sort?).
-- 
           stripes@eng.umd.edu          "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Multitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
"CNN is the only nuclear capable news network..."
    - lbruck@eng.umd.edu (Lewis Bruck)