khedoros1 a day ago

Hmm. I guess I wouldn't have thought it would take 10's of thousands of lines.

  • Jtsummers a day ago

    It doesn't, the actually sorting steps take 16 comparisons and up to 16 swaps. This can be implemented with a sorting network as shown here: https://bertdobbelaere.github.io/sorting_networks_extended.h...

    In Python, you can use parallel assignments which let you express it easily with something like:

      def sort7(l):
        if l[0] > l[6]: l[0], l[6] = l[6], l[0]
        # repeat for each comparison
        return l
    
    That'd be 16 lines + 1 for the function definition + 1 for the return.

    You could even just generate the code or run the network using the representation from that site:

      [(0,6),(2,3),(4,5)]
      [(0,2),(1,4),(3,6)]
      [(0,1),(2,5),(3,4)]
      [(1,2),(4,6)]
      [(2,3),(4,5)]
      [(1,2),(3,4),(5,6)]
    
    If that's in a data structure called layers:

      for layer in layers:
        for a, b in layer:
          if l[a] > l[b]: l[a], l[b] = l[b], l[a]
    
    I'm also pretty sure that a brute force "unrolling" of bubble sort would have resulted in fewer lines. There shouldn't be more than 21 comparisons needed for 7 elements.