Sorts have many attributes. You should learn to study a sort and determine if it has the following properties.

• Pure or imperative
• The cost in terms of time. This is the one-egg-metric idea. We usually express this as a proportionality to the number of elements being sorted or other key property. For example a sort might be proportional to n^2 where n is the number of elements.
• The cost in terms of space to store intermediate data.
• Whether the sort is stable.
• Any special requirements on the input data.

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