[Python-Dev] Drastically improving list.sort() for lists of strings/ints

[Raymond Hettinger]

> On Sep 11, 2016, at 12:45 AM, Elliot Gorokhovsky <elgo8537 at colorado.edu> wrote:
> 
> I am interested in making a non-trivial improvement to list.sort(), but before I put in the work, I want to test the waters and see if this is something the community would accept. Basically, I want to implement radix sort for lists of strings. So list.sort() would detect if it is sorting a list of strings (which is one of the more common things you sort in python) and, if so, use in-place radix sort (see https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/americanFlagSort.html).

For those who are interested, here is a direct link to the PDF that describes the algorithm.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22.6990&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Raymond