If tried that in eg Haskell to see if I can beat the standard library's highly optimized sort.
In theory, you can get O(n log k) performance, where k is the number of distinct elements (so k <= n). And crucially: you don't need to know k up-front.
In practice, all my attempts were absolutely slower than the standard approach based on binary comparisons only. (But that's saying more about me than about the domain.)
Comments
If tried that in eg Haskell to see if I can beat the standard library's highly optimized sort.
In theory, you can get O(n log k) performance, where k is the number of distinct elements (so k <= n). And crucially: you don't need to know k up-front.
In practice, all my attempts were absolutely slower than the standard approach based on binary comparisons only. (But that's saying more about me than about the domain.)