bubble sort n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order;

bubble sort n.

Techspeak for a particular 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. (However, it's been
shown by repeated experiment that below about 5000 records
bubble-sort is OK anyway.) 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.