From: Navindra Umanee <navindra@...>
Date: 2005-03-29T00:14:37+09:00
Subject: Re: ! haphazard

bertrandmuscle@yahoo.com <bertrandmuscle@yahoo.com> wrote:
> this is very interesting, thank you.
> 
> but for myself and perhaps many other users it comes down to how 
> intuitive the language is. from this perspective: if sort! works, 
> sort_by! should also.
>
> one of the things that drew me to ruby recently was this philosophy, but 
> there have been some off-putting inconsistencies.

There is no substitute for understanding what the algorithm is doing
and the efficiency implications...  it is not about intuition or
consistency.  It might be about documentation.

sort_by has efficiency tradeoffs and advantages compared to sort, and
as previously explained it doesn't make sense to have a sort_by!  As
another example, MergeSort is a stable sort and QuickSort is an
unstable sort...  would it make sense to have an unstable
implementation of MergeSort and a stable implementation of QuickSort
for intuitive and consistency purposes?

Cheers,
Navin.