On 10/05/15 05:54, Miller Puckette wrote:
Here are three things I could imagine doing for some future release:
a [list sort] built-in that outputs two lists, one the sorted numbers or symbols, and the other giving the indices of the items in order
an [array sort] object - I guess that should write its outputs into two other arrays, yuck
a [text sort] object that would act like unix "sort": just sort all the lines of the text object.
One thing that is useful in some programming languages is the ability to supply your own comparison algorithm. In Javascript and Python for example you can pass a function to sort() which gets called for each combination of items tested and returns -1, 0, or 1, telling sort which way to swap (or not) each item. Not sure exactly how that would look in Pd - maybe a crossed-wires patch to some subpatch like the idiomatic [f]X[+ 1] patch for counters.
Interesting side-note on Javascript sort() - it is a stable sort on most browsers, but not on Chrome. That little fact ate up two days of my working life once upon a time! :)
Cheers,
Chris.