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I am trying to understand the Scala quicksort example from Wikipedia. How could the sample be disassembled step by step and what does all the syntactic sugar involved mean? def qsort: List[Int] => List[Int] = { case Nil => Nil case pivot :: tail => val (smaller, rest) = tail.partition(_ < pivot) qsort(smaller) ::: pivot :: qsort(rest) } As much as I can gather at this stage qsort is a function that takes no parameters and returns a new Function1[List[Int],List[Int]] that implements quicksort through usage of pattern matching, list manipulation and recursive calls. But I can't quite figure out where the pivot comes from, and how exactly the pattern matching syntax works in this case. UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great explanations! I just wanted to share another example of quicksort implementation which I have discovered in the Scala by Example by Martin Odersky . Although based around arrays instead of lists and less of a show-off in terms of varios Scala features I personally find it much less convoluted than its Wikipedia counterpart, and just so much more clear and to the point expression of the underlying algorithm: def sort(xs: Array[Int]): Array[Int] = { if (xs.length <= 1) xs else { val pivot = xs(xs.length / 2) Array.concat( sort(xs filter (pivot >)), xs filter (pivot ==), sort(xs filter (pivot <))) } }

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