Dear All, I'm trying to get some objects sorted. Every object has a set of pointers to other objects, which need to come before this object (or are considered smaller than this object). It is kind of a make-tool algorithm. I can imagine the straight-forward way to attack this -- searching. Is there some more elegant way I'm missing? The number of objects not small. I tried to write some recursive functor to be passed to std::sort -- caching the result of previous comparisions -- but I was not successful. My brain is hurting... Thanks Peter struct object { std::set<object*> m_sPredecessors; }; // to be sorted: std::list<object*> sList; std::list<object*> sort(std::list<object*> _sList) { std::set<object*> sSet; std::list<object*> sSorted; while (_sList.size()) for (std::list<object*>::iterator p = _sList.begin(), pNext = p, pEnd = _sList.end(); p != pEnd; p = pNext) { ++pNext; bool bFound = false; for (std::set<object*>::const_iterator p1 = (*p)->m_sPredecessors.begin(), p1End = (*p)->m_sPredecessors.end(); p1 != p1End; ++p1) if (sSet.find(*p1) == sSet.end()) { bFound = true; break; } if (!bFound) { sSorted.push_back(*p); _sList.erase(p); } } return sSorted; }