Sort a part of a list in place
Solution 1:
I'd write it this way:
a[i:j] = sorted(a[i:j])
It is not in-place sort either, but fast enough for relatively small segments.
Please note, that Python copies only object references, so the speed penalty won't be that huge compared to a real in-place sort as one would expect.
Solution 2:
if a is a numpy array then to sort [i, j) range in-place, type:
a[i:j].sort()
Example:
>>> import numpy as np
>>> a = np.array([4, 8, 1, 7, 3, 0, 5, 2, 6, 9])
>>> a[1:4].sort()
>>> a
array([4, 1, 7, 8, 3, 0, 5, 2, 6, 9])