On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 4:26 PM Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:

My thoughts exactly.

One other optimization along these lines: the reason ints don't give quite as shocking results as floats is that comparisons are a bit more expensive: one first has to check that the int would fit in a c long before comparing; if not, then a custom procedure has to be used. However, in practice ints being sorted are almost always smaller in absolute value than 2**32 or whatever. So I think, just as it might pay off to check for latin-1 and use strcmp, it may also pay off to check for fits-in-a-C-long and use a custom function for that case as well, since the performance would be precisely as awesome as the float performance that started this thread: comparisons would just be the cost of pointer dereference plus the cost of C long comparison, i.e. the minimum possible cost.