In OCaml you have sort and fastsort - the latter doesn't have to be stable. It currently is, because fastsort = sort.
I think it is a good thing to leave people an option, if there is something important to choose.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:48 AM, <ajb@spamcop.net> wrote:
G'day all.

Adrian Hey wrote:

>> This might be a reasonable thing to say about *sortBy*, but not sort
>> as the ordering of equal elements should not be observable (for any
>> correct instance of Ord). It should be impossible to implement a
>> function which can discriminate between [a,a],[a,b],[b,a],[b,b] if
>> compare a b = EQ.

Nonsense.  Consider a Schwartzian transform wrapper:

data OrdWrap k v = OrdWrap k v

instance (Ord k) => Ord (OrdWrap k v) where
    compare (OrdWrap k1 v1) (OrdWrap k2 v2) = OrdWrap k1 k2

It would be incorrect (and not sane) for sort [a,b] to return [a,a] in
this case, though a case could be made that either [a,b] or [b,a] make
sense.

Quoting Jules Bean <jules@jellybean.co.uk>:

> Stability is a nice property. I don't understand why you are arguing
> against this so aggressiviely.

Stability is an occasionally very useful property.  However, if there
is a tradeoff between stability and performance, I'd prefer it if the
library didn't choose for me.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage
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