From: Wayne Scott <wscott@...>
Date: 2001-05-17T07:47:36+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15319] Re: Pluggable sorting - How would you do it?

From: matz@zetabits.com (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
> It implements Schwartzian transformation inside.  I like this idea,
> but am not yet sure "sort_by" is a proper name for the behavior.

How about "sort_using" ??

BTW I have noticed that sorting on multiple fields feels clumsy in
Ruby.

tbl.sort! do |a,b| 
    r = b[0] <=> a[0]
    r = a[1] <=> b[1] unless r.nonzero?
    r
end

vs

sort {$b->[0] <=> $a->[0]
	       ||
      $a->[1] <=> $b->[1]} @tbl;  

in perl.

You get bitten by the fact that 0 does not evaluate to false in ruby.

Of course I might just be too comfortable with perl.

-Wayne