What's wrong with qsort comparator?
So I've been doing my homework on C, and there was this task: "An array of ints is given, write a function that sorts them in following way: first, the even numbers in non-decreasing order, second, the odd numbers in non-increasing". For example, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] -> [2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1].
The task itself is about writing a comparator function for qsort correctly. I wrote the following cmp
:
int
cmp(const void *elem1, const void *elem2)
{
int p_number1 = *(int *) elem1, p_number2 = *(int *) elem2, diff_flag = 0;
if (p_number1 > p_number2) {
diff_flag = 1;
} else if (p_number1 < p_number2) {
diff_flag = -1;
}
if ((p_number1 & 1) == (p_number2 & 1)) { // same parity
return diff_flag == 0 ? 0 : diff_flag ^ ((p_number1 & 1) << 31);
/* in even case, diff_flag will be returned, otherwise,
* number with sign that is different from diff_flag's will be returned */
}
return (p_number1 & 1) - (p_number2 & 1); // if first is odd, and second is even, 1 is returned, and vice versa
}
and the testing system spits out a runtime error. it does return INT_MIN and INT_MAX for less and bigger cases respectively, but doesn't that satisfy qsort's specifications? besides, it worked fine on all the arrays I was testing it with locally. Maybe anyone knows why is there a RE?
P.S. I understand I'm making it in the most non-readable way possible, but I am obliged to rely mostly on bit ops and do everything in most optimal way possible, so I apologize for complexity.
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