[Phoenix-pm] A novice logs onto IRC and asks how to sort without using sort...

[Victor Odhner]

Scott Walters wrote:
 > Ask a stupid question . . .

Stupid question indeed. For years I worked in languages in which sorting 
was a major chore, requiring all sorts of finagling. I had great respect 
for COBOL because, for all its verbosity, at least I could do a sort by 
just saying so. The sort function is one of Perl's three greatest 
features, along with hashes and regular expressions (the latter used in 
a sane and comprehensible manner, please).

BTW, I never write scripts or one-liners in Perl. I write programs. And 
I use "eval" as a rare last resort ... in the old days we called that 
"code modification" or "alteration", and it turned out then to be a 
Really Bad Idea. It still is.

I can play the guitar behind my back. I just don't see any need to.

There's more than one way to do it. And many of them are nightmares. ;-)

Sign me "Stodgy" . . .