TL;DR

I needed to sort an incidence matrix lexicographically.

Working on a program to find a design for Steiner design S(2, 4, 28), I needed to work on the input incidence matrices to apply a constraint programming technique and find a resolution (i.e. partitioning of matches in rounds).

To ease things, my algorithm assumed that the incidence matrix was sorted lexicographically. Hence… I needed to do this sorting.

The heart is the following function:

sub lexi_pass ($M) {$M = [
map            { $_->[1] } reverse sort {$a->[0] cmp $b->[0] } map { [join('',$_->@*), $_] } transposed($M)->@*
]
for 1 .. 2;
return $M; } ## end sub lexi_pass ($M)


It does a sorting pass both by column and by row, in this order. The sorting is actually always applied by row, but the transposed function switches the roles to work on columns too:

sub transposed ($M) { my$J = $M->[0]->@* - 1; my @T; for my$i (0 .. $#$M) {
for my $j (0 ..$J) {
$T[$j][$i] =$M->[$i][$j];
}
}
return \@T;
} ## end sub transposed ($M)  For reasons that I didn’t investigate a single pass is not sufficient, hence I embedded it in a loop to repeat one more pass until we reach a stable situation. The same function also takes care to read and parse the input incidence matrix, provided as text: sub lexi_parse ($incidence_text) {
$incidence_text =~ s{\s+\z}{}mxs; my$incidence = [map { [split m{}mxs] } split m{\s+}, $incidence_text]; while ('necessary') {$incidence = lexi_pass($incidence); my$new = join "\n", map { join '', $_->@* }$incidence->@*;
return $incidence if$new eq $incidence_text;$incidence_text = $new; } ## end while ('necessary') } ## end sub lexi_parse ($incidence_text)


After each pass, the incidence matrix text is reconstructed and compared to the previous iteration. When there is no change, we call it a day and return.