Someone jokingly asked me how I would sort a million 32-bit integers in 2 megabytes of RAM, using Python [...] obviously this is a joke question -- the data alo

Someone jokingly asked me how I would sort a million 32-bit integers in 2 megabytes of RAM, using Python [...] obviously this is a joke question -- the data alone would take up 4 megabytes, assuming binary encoding This question seems to come up a lot at Google - didn't their CEO ask it of Obama and McCain when they visited? I like that instead of going into a complicated solution to a tricky problem, GvR shows the very simple and general way to solve a slightly easier version more people are likely to encounter. Unfortunately I was sort of hoping he would take the Programming Pearls approach instead of treating it as a joke. Bently showed several ways to do this kind of constrained memory sorting given differing assumptions, but perhaps that kind of thing just isn't interesting for the places Python is used.