It seems a simple problem, yet…

Sorting by indices, part 2

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

Before we dig into the Schwartzian transform, let's look at a more conventional generic way to sort by a key:

template<typename Iter, typename UnaryOperation, typename Compare>
void sort_by(Iter first, Iter last, UnaryOperation op, Compare comp)
{
  std::sort(first, last,
            [&](T& a, T& b) { return comp(op(a), op(b)); });
}

The idea here is that you give a unary operator op that produces a sort key, and we sort the items by that key according to the comparer...