Julia: Undocumented searchsorted methods

[jarlela]

Several methods of the searchsorted family of functions are undocumented. One example is searchsorted(v:AbstractArray{T,1} where T, x, ilo::Int64, ihi::Int64, o::Base.Order.Ordering). It would be nice if these were documented.

[StefanKarpinski]

Or not exposed accidentally. We should make those internal—better to use views for that functionality.

[jarlela]

Ok, I see now that the needed ordering structs aren’t exported either. So it makes sense.

I have to say that I would have liked to have the method with ‘hi’ and ‘lo’ boundaries available. In my case I often need the index of the original large array and my code turned out both faster and cleaner (IMO) by using this method of ‘searchsortedfirst’.

[StefanKarpinski]

Have you tried using views to limit the portion of the array that you're working with? That's the more composable approach but we're not 100% on eliminating overhead for view creation yet.

[jarlela]

Yes, I have tried using views and that works great. I just noticed that the execution time dropped slightly more when I changed my code to using the searchsorted method with bounds.

However, I don’t think this difference in execution speed is large enough to be important in most cases. It just seemed to be the right method for my needs, but I do appreciate that it might make more sense to keep the public api clean and make these methods internal.