NAME

       sort - perl pragma to control sort() behaviour

SYNOPSIS

       The sort pragma is now a no-op, and its use is discouraged. These three operations are
       valid, but have no effect:

           use sort 'stable';          # guarantee stability
           use sort 'defaults';        # revert to default behavior
           no  sort 'stable';          # stability not important

DESCRIPTION

       Historically the "sort" pragma you can control the behaviour of the builtin sort()
       function.

       Prior to v5.28.0 there were two other options:

           use sort '_mergesort';
           use sort '_qsort';          # or '_quicksort'

       If you try and specify either of these in v5.28+ it will croak.

       The default sort has been stable since v5.8.0, and given this consistent behaviour for
       almost two decades, everyone has come to assume stability.

       Stability will remain the default - hence there is no need for a pragma for code to opt
       into stability "just in case" this changes - it won't.

       We do not foresee going back to offering multiple implementations of general purpose
       sorting - hence there is no future need to offer a pragma to choose between them.

       If you know that you care that much about performance of your sorting, and that for your
       use case and your data, it was worth investigating alternatives, possible to identify an
       alternative from our default that was better, and the cost of switching was worth it, then
       you know more than we do. Likely whatever choices we can give are not as good as
       implementing your own. (For example, a Radix sort can be faster than O(n log n), but can't
       be used for all keys and has larger overheads.)

       We are not averse to changing the sort algorithm, but we don't see the benefit in offering
       the choice of two general purpose implementations.

CAVEATS

       The function sort::current() was provided to report the current state of the sort
       pragmata. This function was not exported, and there is no code to call it on CPAN. It is
       now deprecated, and will warn by default.

       As we no longer store any sort "state", it can no longer return the correct value, so it
       will always return the string "stable", as this is consistent with what we actually have
       implemented.