Arrange 0's & 1's in a array

Question

This is one of an interview question which I had recently. I would like to know others perception of approach for this problem.

Question:

Yo

Answer 1

My implementation in Perl using simple weighting.

use Modern::Perl;

my @data;
{
  use List::MoreUtils qw'natatime';
  my $iter = natatime 2, qw'
    X1  0
    X2  1
    X3  0
    X4  1
    X5  0
  ';

  while( my($a,$b) = $iter->() ){
    push @data, [$a,$b]
  }
}

my @sorted = sort {
  ($a->[1] <=> $b->[1]) * -2 + # gives more weight to second element
  ($a->[0] cmp $b->[0])
} @data;

say "Name\tDept\n";
say join "\t", @$_ for @sorted;

Name    Dept

X2      1
X4      1
X1      0
X3      0
X5      0

The output of <=> and cmp comparisons is a value of -1,0,1.
By multiplying one of the camparisons by two we get one of -2,0,2.
After adding the value of the other operator we get one of -3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3

I wanted to see how many comparisons it would do so I added some debugging information and came up with this.

 a           b        a1      b1     a0     b0
X1,0   ->   X2,1      0   --> 1      X1 <-  X2
X3,0   ->   X4,1      0   --> 1      X3 <-  X4
X2,1  <-    X4,1      1   -   1      X2 <-  X4
X4,1  <-    X1,0      1 <--   0      X4  -> X1
X1,0  <-    X3,0      0   -   0      X1 <-  X3
X2,1 <<-    X5,0      1 <--   0      X2 <-  X5
X5,0   ->>  X4,1      0   --> 1      X5  -> X4
X5,0   ->   X1,0      0   -   0      X5  -> X1
X5,0   ->   X3,0      0   -   0      X5  -> X3

The arrows point at the earlier value.