I think this involves the communication skills of a programmer. Who is using this function? Is it it usually called many times or just once or twice. During the past week I was helping a newbie with subs to process partial log files. The sort functions lent themselves to speedy list processing, but users would rarely trigger such calls and we used a loop for multiple calls to increase efficiency of the sub.

It goes back to: "know your customers" or in this case your typical users.