[Python-Dev] Drastically improving list.sort() for lists of strings/ints (original) (raw)

Elliot Gorokhovsky elliot.gorokhovsky at gmail.com
Sun Sep 11 13:34:44 EDT 2016

Thanks for the link. If you look at the conclusion it says "We recommend American flag sort as an all-round algorithm for sorting strings."

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016, 11:30 AM Raymond Hettinger < raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sep 11, 2016, at 12:45 AM, Elliot Gorokhovsky <elgo8537 at colorado.edu> wrote: > > I am interested in making a non-trivial improvement to list.sort(), but before I put in the work, I want to test the waters and see if this is something the community would accept. Basically, I want to implement radix sort for lists of strings. So list.sort() would detect if it is sorting a list of strings (which is one of the more common things you sort in python) and, if so, use in-place radix sort (see https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/americanFlagSort.html). For those who are interested, here is a direct link to the PDF that describes the algorithm.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22.6990&rep=rep1&type=pdf Raymond -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20160911/ccf285c4/attachment.html>

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