sort for generators

[simonschoelly]

I noticed that sort does not work for Base.Generator. Would it make sense to have an implementation for that, something like

sort(generator::Base.Generator; kwargs...) = sort!(collect(generator); kwargs...)

?

[KlausC]

You can also use this: https://github.com/KlausC/GeneratorArrays.jl

julia> using GeneratorArrays

julia> sort(array(x^3 for x in -3:3), rev = true)
7-element Vector{Int64}:
  27
   8
   1
   0
  -1
  -8
 -27

[StefanKarpinski]

I think this was one of @ararslan's first undertakings, but it never got merged. I'd be very much in favor though: it collects and then sort!s the collected result.

[LilithHafner]

@ararslan's PR was closed with "Unless there's someone who's really into this idea, I'll go ahead and close this PR".

Now that there appears to be someone who's really into this idea (@simonschoelly & @StefanKarpinski), I've made a similar PR

[PallHaraldsson]

Should this be reopened since the PR was reverted, or simply not add this feature? People have done without it and can rather do collect?

[gbaraldi]

During triage this was discussed (again), and the consensus seemed to be that the default behaviour should be collect + sort!. But that is just a reasonable default and that the documented behavior is to return something that supports getindex and iterate. So if some type wants to define a specialized return type they are still allowed to, i.e ranges returning a range. This behaviour is a bit similar to what map does.