Any interest in a function like this to add to subr.el?

[John Wiegley]

(defun sort-on (seq predicate accessor)
  "Sort SEQ use PREDICATE applied to values returned by ACCESSOR.
This implements the so-called Schwartzian transform, which has
the performance advantage of applying ACCESSOR at most once per
element in the list, as opposed to using `sort' with a PREDICATE
that applies the ACCESSOR.
Note: this function is only a win over `sort' if ACCESSOR is
compute-intensive; otherwise, it uses more intermediate cons
cells than regular `sort', and so represents a memory for CPU
tradeoff."
  (mapcar #'cdr (sort (mapcar #'(lambda (x) (cons (funcall accessor x) x)) seq)
                      #'(lambda (x y) (funcall predicate (car x) (car y))))))

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2