Re: Baby X is bor nagain

On 20/06/2024 18:56, Malcolm McLean wrote:

Yes, a qsort written in the natural way can getstuck if a sub0array it considered sorted becmes not sortted on the next pass.

I have no idea what you might think of as the "natural" way to implement qsort.  But if it were, as the name implies, a quicksort, then it would not get stuck.  At each step, progress is always made - even with a comparison function that gave random values, you'd still have a worst case complexity of O(n²).
The only sorting algorithm I can think of that might get stuck with a slightly broken comparison function would be a poor bubblesort implementation that is run over the whole array every round, simply repeating until no changes are made in a round.