Re: type_size_sort

From: Morten Welinder <mwelinder@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 7, 2005, 00:51 UTC
Message-ID: <118833cc0512061651y57ddcdc7pd26996b40c08d225@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <439604DF.5010603@op5.se>

Show 6 quoted lines

> It's perfectly correct. If the same list was to be passed to
> create_sorted_list() twice it will come out exactly the same the second
> time as it did the first. The only thing to remark on is that the return
> above could be written as below instead:
>
>         return a - b;

That is not what the part of the standard I quoted says. It very clearly forbids the sorting function from depending on the pointers' values. I can even see an implementation actually using this requirement.

And it is well known that some qsort implementations will do nasty things if the sorting order is not consistent. I've seen Perl core dumps on that account, although that is a while ago.

M.