There are lots of ways to get about a 50% speed increase over an ST. Creating all of those tiny anonymous arrays isn't a speedy task. It does lead to rather simple and non-error-prone code, however.
One alternative that is as general purpose is to build a separate array of keys to sort on and then sort a list of indices from that:
my @sorted= do {
my @sorton= map { get_date($_) } @data;
my @indices= sort { $sorton[$a] cmp $sorton[$b] } 0..@data;
@data[@indices];
};
Another alternative that can be slightly faster but is a bit harder to customize is to combine the key to sort on with the original data into a single string in a reversible manner and use:
my @sorted= map { restore_orig_data($_) }
sort map { prepend_sort_key($_) } @data;
See also
http://www.sysarch.com/perl/sort_paper.html or even
http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/sort.html.
-
tye
(but my friends call me "Tye")
