Sort in return statement

[SimonN]

On Saturday, 9 December 2017 at 03:24:52 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Saturday, 9 December 2017 at 02:45:35 UTC, rjframe wrote:
>>
>> `sort` returns a SortedRange of ushorts, not an array of 
>> ushorts. Make it:
>>
>> ```
>> import std.array : array;
>> return sort(numbers.take(8)).array;
>> ```
>>
>> --Ryan
>
> That's it!
>
> Thanks Ryan.

Yes, this works, and your algorithm would even accept arbitary 
random-access ranges, not merely arrays.

But since we start explicitly with a ushort[] that this function 
has allocated just for this algorithm, we could save the extra 
allocation by the final call to array().

     // ushort[] numbers = ...
     randomShuffle(numbers);

     import std.algorithm.sorting : sort;
     numbers = numbers[0 .. 8];
     sort(numbers);
     return numbers;

sort(numbers) does two things: (1) affect the underlying data, 
(2) return an input range with extra information that this 
returned range is sorted. But in our example, we don't need to 
allocate a fresh array from (2). We can return the sorted data 
from (1), this is already in array-form.

-- Simon