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bubble sort: n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of
adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if
they are out of order; thus, list entries ‘bubble upward’ in
the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is
not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled
on by naive and untutored programmers, hackers
consider it the canonical example of a naive
algorithm. (However, it's been shown by repeated experiment that below
about 5000 records bubble-sort is OK anyway.) The canonical example of a
really bad algorithm is
bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of
ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or
willful perversity.
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