so, as i said, possibly write a specialised container to do that. but you are still going to need to read the million clowns, so maybe (i haven't investigated this) the best approach is to read the clowns, which you have to do anyway, and then see if they can be inserted into an array of the currently highest funniest (though i would never see clowns as being funny). i don't remember saying anything about sorting to solve this specific problem, only in the general case - perhaps i did not make this clear.