The key to the various sort columns got lost. Pulled from
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026876.html
diff --git a/Objects/listsort.txt b/Objects/listsort.txt
index 139c17c..68e918d 100644
--- a/Objects/listsort.txt
+++ b/Objects/listsort.txt
@@ -54,6 +54,16 @@
+ Here are exact comparison counts across all the tests in sortperf.py,
when run with arguments "15 20 1".
+ Column Key:
+ *sort: random data
+ \sort: descending data
+ /sort: ascending data
+ 3sort: ascending, then 3 random exchanges
+ +sort: ascending, then 10 random at the end
+ ~sort: many duplicates
+ =sort: all equal
+ !sort: worst case scenario
+
First the trivial cases, trivial for samplesort because it special-cased
them, and trivial for timsort because it naturally works on runs. Within
an "n" block, the first line gives the # of compares done by samplesort,