A 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. 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.
[
Jargon File]