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Re:What do the best interviewers have in common? by TheOtherHobbes on Friday December 01, 2017 @08:33AM (#15823671)
If you're just sorting ASCII English it's pretty trivial, as long as you assume ASCII ordering throughout.

But for all possible data types, in all (okay - most) written languages, with full unicode support, dealing successfully with all possible localised edge cases defining postal/delivery address and date/time formats - very hard indeed.

Re:What do the best interviewers have in common? by EGreg on Friday December 01, 2017 @11:05AM (#15824653)
Well that's up to the writer of that class to implement a comparator function to define a total order correctly. I am not even sure there an be a meaningful total order on postal addresses.

The binary sort algorithm shouldn't care about how that's implemented.

Separation of concerns baby :)