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Historically correctness wasn't seen as an important goal in C++ and so no, I don't think any of the three popular C++ stdlib implementations will do something
by tialaramex 3y ago
Historically correctness wasn't seen as an important goal in C++ and so no, I don't think any of the three popular C++ stdlib implementations will do something vaguely reasonable for nonsense sort input. It's potentially faster (though bad for correctness) to just trust that this case can't happen since the programmer was required to use types with total ordering. So yes, I'd expect it to result in bounds misses in real software.
- lmm 3y agoI wouldn't think you could get bounds misses without doing extra comparisons, so I'd expect real-world sort implementations to just fail to sort, which doesn't seem particularly unreasonable. But in any case, it's a huge leap from "existing C++ stdlib implementations behave badly in this case" to "the C++ standard requires every implementation to behave badly in this case".