Re:Show HN: XKCD-inspired StackSort
by thedufer on Monday March 18, 2013 @02:48PM
(#5396306)
That's because it always tried answers in the same order. If you tell it to keep going, it'll succesfully sort with http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4833651/javascript-array-... and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12137690/javascript-sort-... as well.
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Those two don't work in the general case.
The first only leaves the unique members of the list, so you get a sorted set. The second sorts lexicographically, because javascript's .sort() method on arrays sorts lexicographically. This means that if you have a list of numbers like [1, 2, 10], it will get sorted as [1, 10, 2]. Unless you pass your own comparator in.
What this page really demonstrates is that there is precisely one answer on stackoverflow containing a complete generic sort function in javascript (quicksort in fact).