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Asked: 2026-06-18T12:16:45+00:00

As they say, true quicksort sorts in-place . So the standard short Haskell code

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As they say, “true quicksort sorts in-place”. So the standard short Haskell code for quicksort,

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort []     = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
  where
    lesser  = filter (< p) xs
    greater = filter (>= p) xs

what algorithm/computational process is it describing, after all?

It surely isn’t what Tony Hoare devised, lacking its most defining feature, the in-place partitioning algorithm.

(the answer might be well known, but not yet here on SO).

correction: this question is in fact a duplicate: the answer is known on SO after all: cf. Pseudo-quicksort time complexity .

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s quicksort for linked lists.

    Yup, this is quicksort, just not in-place. It matches the high-level algorithm for quicksort whilst changing the low-level implementation to match the data structure of linked lists. That’s why it’s quicksort for linked lists.

    I’d prefer to say “quicksort was originally developed to work in-place” than “true quicksort is done in-place”. There are many variants of quicksort including picking pivots randomly to avoid worse-case behaviour etc.. This is a sensible, clear definition of quicksort for linked lists.

    This definition exactly matches how we teach quicksort to 16 year-old maths students in the UK. (We’re teaching algorithms, not programming.) In-place very much obscures the purpose and design, which is why we don’t teach that detail, despite being a million miles from teaching functional programming or linked lists. (That doesn’t change the fact that the pair-swapping trick in-place algorithm is best when you have destructive update arrays.)

    There is a time penalty to this definition, since it traverses the list twice for the two sublists. It’s certainly possible to rewrite this to partition rather than filter, but I assert that that’s optimising rather than changing the fundamental algorithm here, quicksort.

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