Now that I have everyone's attention, this is not a bug report.

In the computer science texts a sort routine is thrown into one of two bins: "Stable" or "Unstable".

In this context a "Stable" sort retains the original element order if the keys are equal and an "Unstable" sort does not guarantee that order.

Consider the following unsorted table

11 A
11 B
10 A
10 B
10 C
11 C

An ascending stable sort by the first field would always return:

10 A
10 B
10 C
11 A
11 B
11 C

An ascending unstable sort by the first field might return:

10 C
10 A
10 B
11 A
11 C
11 B

Neither sort is intrinsically better, but it pays to know what you are dealing with -- if this matters in your application.

Buzz, can I get some clarification? I presume it's not the ProntoScript Sort(), it is the sort algorithm supported by the Javascript engine Spidermonkey() 1.6R2?

Correct?

Lyndel,

I was using Array.sort() in the simulator.

I didn't discover this by accident. If the sort was stable, I could use a simpler orderfunc.

This is an interesting optimization challenge. I'm actually ordering the array by timestamp. On the simulator I see lots of equal keys, but on the actual remote I may not see any or many -- for this generation of hardware.

Array.sort() probably uses a variant of quicksort. Given that my array is nearly in order, quicksort is a poor choice. A tweaked variant of a bubble sort would be faster, but this would need to execute at the script level rather than as an intrinsic function. For interpreted languages, using a generalized "big job" intrinsic function often results in faster execution times than using a smarter scripted function.

Along these lines, have you done any time trials comparing passing an inline anonymous function argument vs passing a formal function name in loops?

I've done a bit of testing but not quite sure what you are asking. Can you give me an example?

Thanks,
Lyndel

Quicksort,Bbubblesort, its been years since I heard those terms. I generally used a bubble sort with a decreasing list size as things bubbled out of the arrays unsorted portion. very easy to implement, Quicksort was trickier from an implementation standpoint.

Lyndel,

I was asking about the relative execution efficiency of :

Array.sort( function(a,b) { return  a-b });

vs

function rank( a, b, ){
  return( a - b );
}

Array.sort( rank );

oops, better get Lyndel's name right. I had to write it on the blackboard 100 times just to show penance.

Thanks, I need a syntax checker.

I believe that the performance should be relatively the same between the 2.