use Perl

• the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:1)

  by rjbs (4671) on 2006.02.04 13:01 (#46010) Homepage Journal

  I've always thought the obvious behavior would be to return the first element. It doesn't gain much (saves you typing two parens, maybe), but it's just what I always thought made sense...

  --
  rjbs

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  • Re:the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:1)

    by rjbs (4671)

    I also always want to call the first element returned from sort the "most sorted element." I just like the sound of it.

    --
    rjbs
  • Re:the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:2)

    by bart (450)

    The first (min)... or the last (max)?
    
    Both would have their uses.
    • Re:the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:1)

      by rjbs (4671)

      The first. If you want the last, you'd reverse $a and $b in your sort.

      --
      rjbs
    • Re:the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:2)

      by BooK (2612)

      Except that it's bound to be used as a shortcut for min() or max() (I've seen people write (sort @list)[-1]), which is rather inefficient compared to using List::Util (now in the core) or rolling you own min() or max().

      Code examples [mongueurs.net] and benchmarks [mongueurs.net] available there, in French (sorry).
  • Re:the "obvious" unexciting thing (Score:2)

    by schwern (1528)

    Here's a short mental gauntlet for any proposal to run though:
    
    If sort() should do X, why not map and grep?
    
    Why is X useful as an implicit behavior?
    
    Why not use a user defined function (in this case List::Util's max/min)? (bonus: no argument about if it should return the first or last element)
    
    Will it help in the common "return sort ..." gotcha?
    
    Can you think of common cases where you want to return the entire list in list context but only do X in scalar?