Guile Reference Manual
24.3 Sorting
Sorting is very important in computer programs. Therefore, Guile comes
with several sorting procedures built-in. As always, procedures with
names ending in ! are side-effecting, that means that they may
modify their parameters in order to produce their results.
The first group of procedures can be used to merge two lists (which must
be already sorted on their own) and produce sorted lists containing
all elements of the input lists.
- Scheme Procedure: merge alist blist less
-
- C Function: scm_merge (alist, blist, less)
- Merge two already sorted lists into one.
Given two lists alist and blist, such that
(sorted? alist less?) and (sorted? blist less?),
return a new list in which the elements of alist and
blist have been stably interleaved so that
(sorted? (merge alist blist less?) less?).
Note: this does _not_ accept vectors.
- Scheme Procedure: merge! alist blist less
-
- C Function: scm_merge_x (alist, blist, less)
- Takes two lists alist and blist such that
(sorted? alist less?) and (sorted? blist less?) and
returns a new list in which the elements of alist and
blist have been stably interleaved so that
(sorted? (merge alist blist less?) less?).
This is the destructive variant of merge
Note: this does _not_ accept vectors.
The following procedures can operate on sequences which are either
vectors or list. According to the given arguments, they return sorted
vectors or lists, respectively. The first of the following procedures
determines whether a sequence is already sorted, the other sort a given
sequence. The variants with names starting with stable- are
special in that they maintain a special property of the input sequences:
If two or more elements are the same according to the comparison
predicate, they are left in the same order as they appeared in the
input.
- Scheme Procedure: sorted? items less
-
- C Function: scm_sorted_p (items, less)
- Return
#t iff items is a list or a vector such that
for all 1 <= i <= m, the predicate less returns true when
applied to all elements i - 1 and i
- Scheme Procedure: sort items less
-
- C Function: scm_sort (items, less)
- Sort the sequence items, which may be a list or a
vector. less is used for comparing the sequence
elements. This is not a stable sort.
- Scheme Procedure: sort! items less
-
- C Function: scm_sort_x (items, less)
- Sort the sequence items, which may be a list or a
vector. less is used for comparing the sequence
elements. The sorting is destructive, that means that the
input sequence is modified to produce the sorted result.
This is not a stable sort.
- Scheme Procedure: stable-sort items less
-
- C Function: scm_stable_sort (items, less)
- Sort the sequence items, which may be a list or a
vector. less is used for comparing the sequence elements.
This is a stable sort.
- Scheme Procedure: stable-sort! items less
-
- C Function: scm_stable_sort_x (items, less)
- Sort the sequence items, which may be a list or a
vector. less is used for comparing the sequence elements.
The sorting is destructive, that means that the input sequence
is modified to produce the sorted result.
This is a stable sort.
The procedures in the last group only accept lists or vectors as input,
as their names indicate.
- Scheme Procedure: sort-list items less
-
- C Function: scm_sort_list (items, less)
- Sort the list items, using less for comparing the
list elements. This is a stable sort.
- Scheme Procedure: sort-list! items less
-
- C Function: scm_sort_list_x (items, less)
- Sort the list items, using less for comparing the
list elements. The sorting is destructive, that means that the
input list is modified to produce the sorted result.
This is a stable sort.
- Scheme Procedure: restricted-vector-sort! vec less startpos endpos
-
- C Function: scm_restricted_vector_sort_x (vec, less, startpos, endpos)
- Sort the vector vec, using less for comparing
the vector elements. startpos and endpos delimit
the range of the vector which gets sorted. The return value
is not specified.
