bubble sort: n. 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.
![[prev]](../gif/left.gif){kind=small}
![[up]](../gif/up.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](../gif/right.gif){kind=small}