[Python-Dev] timsort?

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> timsort() is a 2.3 feature, not a 2.2 feature.

Note that we switched from doing two minor releases per year, to something
like one minor release per two years (2.2 was released in 2001!).  timsort
is less than a year old, IIRC.  Since it can raise MemoryError where the 2.2
sort could not, and may compute different results on the same inputs, it was
much more a new feature than a bugfix.

> There's a SF project that contains a backport of timsort() to 2.2
> though.

    http://py-stablesort.sourceforge.net/