This should perhaps go ino a different section - and if a sufficiently blessed personage decides to move if then I have no problem with that

I have been thinking about the famed Schwartzian Transform as it is coming in extremely handy for some stuff I want to do. However, as seems to have been noted elsewhere*, one problem with the ST is that it is not exactly memory efficient in that you end up with a number of temporary copies of the array floating around requiring garbage collection. This is merely inconvenient for small arrays and small elements - but if you are sorting (as I am) large arrays of large complex structures (the results of XML::Simpled:XMLin() if you must know), then this can cause exciting disk swaps (and since I'm testing this on a windows PC even more exciting crashes when something fails to handle failed malloc()s properly) which rather defeats the point of the ST.

Once upon a time, I learned APL - a language which could perhaps be described as perl-like only terser - and APL has a built in array sort mchanism. The interesting thing about APL's sort routine (⍋ or ⍒ aka Del(ta) Stile) is that it returns you an array of indices into the original array rather than the sorted array itself. Thus, instead of doing (in perl notation)

my @sortedarray = sort @unsortedarray;
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you actually do

my @sortedarray = @unsortedarray[sort @unsortedarray];
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It occured to me that this idea could be used in the ST so that what gets passed around in the map{} sort{} map{} is in fact [$sort_target, $index] rather than [$sort_target, $entire_element] as this is much much smaller.

The code to do this is below and seems to both use less memory and be slightly quicker although I have yet to run this on a truly huge set of data

my @sorted = @unsorted[ map {$$_[1]} 
                        sort {$$b[0]<=>$$a[0]}
                        map [expensive($unsorted[$_]), $_]; } 
                        0..$#unsorted ];
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Additional thought: (Inspired by diotalevi) There are probably a number of cases where you actually want to make further manipulations to the index to the data rather than the data itself. In such cases, the  @unsorted[ ] may be omitted.

Comments, (constructive) abuse, praise etc. welcome...

Dingus
*There is almost certainly a better discussion - (update) some others are noted in the replies below
(update misc typos fixed)

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