Sorting¶

Idio uses the Scheme SRFI-95-style sorting and merging functions.

Here the primary sorting API is sort seq less? [accessor] which uses the comparator less? to order the elements of the sequence seq (a list or array).

less? doesn’t actually have to order the first less than the second but just be consistent. Here we’ll use the numeric “greater than” function as our ordering function.

simple-sort.idio¶

nums := list 1 7 5 3 9

define (my-gt n1 n2) {
  n1 gt n2
}

printf "nums high to low = %s\n" (sort nums my-gt)

$ idio simple-sort
nums high to low = (9 7 5 3 1)

Tip

If you wanted to use gt directly then you need to escape its operator functionality from the reader, so (sort nums \gt).

Accessor¶

The optional accessor allows you to use the elements of seq as keys into any other data structure and less? will operate on the result of calling (accessor element).

In this example we want to sort some strings by their length. Here we can use string-length as the accessor which will return a number as a proxy for the string:

accessor-sort.idio¶

strs := '("apple"
          "banana"
          "chocolate")

printf "strs longest to shortest = %s\n" (sort strs \gt string-length)

$ idio accessor-sort
strs longest to shortest = ("chocolate" "banana" "apple")

Sorting By File Attributes¶

This accessor technique is used for sorting files by some of their stat(2) attributes.

When sort-atime (and siblings) is passed a list of filenames it first libc/stats each file and constructs a table of the results indexed by the file name. Subsequently, the accessor function can look up the results, access the st_atime member and use the C/< comparator to order the results.

We can try that with the Unicode files in utils/Unicode in the source distribution.

unicode-sort.idio¶

files := glob "utils/Unicode/*"
sorted-files := sort-size files

for file in sorted-files {
  ls -l file
}

Note that ls will re-sort any list of files it is given hence for our example we need to pass each file individually resulting in the less elegant output:

$ idio unicode-sort
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 281 Nov  2 16:12 utils/Unicode/README
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 22781 Jan 28  2022 utils/Unicode/UTF-8-test.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 96863 Nov  2 16:12 utils/Unicode/GraphemeBreakProperty.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 132360 Nov  2 16:12 utils/Unicode/PropList.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 1053943 Nov  2 16:12 utils/Unicode/DerivedCoreProperties.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 1913704 Nov  2 16:12 utils/Unicode/UnicodeData.txt

Tip

These functions will always use C/< resulting in an ascending order. You can trivially get the descending order by reversing the list:

sorted-files := reverse! (sort-size files)

Last built at 2024-05-21T06:11:41Z+0000 from 77077af (dev) for Idio 0.3