use Perl

• Re: (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  And yeah, you can make a case for returning an item count instead of just undef.
  • Why "item count"? Least likely! (Score:2)

    by merlyn (47)

    See my perlmonks posting on scalar context [perlmonks.org]. "Count" is actually in the minority for things being returned in a scalar context.

    I think a much more interesting thing would be a floating point value between 0 and 1 of how many adjacent pairs of items already meet the sort criteria, so "1..5" would be 1, but "reverse 1..5" would be 0.

    --
    

    • Randal L. Schwartz
    • Stonehenge
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      That sortedness factor you propose sounds really useless. 0 + sort qw( 1 3 5 7 9 0 2 4 6 8 10 ) would return 0.9. But what am I supposed to conclude from that? The list is certainly not 90% sorted, nor can I think of any other way in which this metric might be useful.

      OTOH, returning the item count would allow parity for

      sub foo { sort @_ }

      with

      sub bar { map $_, @_ }

      and

      sub baz { grep 1, @_ }

      in scalar context.

      And item count in scalar context is actually the majority among functions that take a l [perlmonks.org]
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Aristotle (5147) <pagaltzis@gmx.de> on 2005.10.02 1:41 (#43642) Homepage Journal

        Okay, it would return 0.8, because the default sort comparator is alphanumeric, not numeric, but you get the point.

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