bubble sort

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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