bubble sort

A 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. 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.

[Jargon File]