Java: Sorting Phone Numbers with limited storage.

[earnest locust]

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[hot nexus]

couldn't you just sort them normally

a lot of sorts are in-place and don't use much more memory

[wide vigil]

Would you mind giving an example?

[hot nexus]

i mean, i can't think of an example that would violate the storage limit

so like, any sane sorting? built-in is timsort, for example

[proper pulsar]

alternatively, just swap them in place

that'd take a bit long tho

builtin timsort would probably be the best option

[hot nexus]

just to give a point of reference, the most efficient (and sane) way to store the inputs would just be as 2,000,000 ints, which in itself would be 8 MB
so if you have better than 2n space efficiency you're set

so i think even non-in-place merge sort would work (if you manage the memory well)