Comment by eru

> Having a generalised sort doesn't mean you can't write a more specialised one which better fits your data set e.g. you might be in a situation where a radix sort is more appropriate.

The opposite might also be true. Suppose you already have a specialised implementation, and you want to write a new generalised one. You can still test them against each other.

Eg suppose you are writing a library that supports sorting crazy huge datasets that don't fit into memory. You can still check that it gives the same answers as the built-in sorting algorithm from the standard library on input that's small enough to fit into memory.