Find the x smallest integers in a list of length n

Question

You have a list of n integers and you want the x smallest. For example,

x_smallest([1, 2, 5, 4, 3], 3) should return [1, 2, 3].

I\'ll v

Answer 1

In scala, and probably other functional languages, a no brainer:

scala> List (1, 3, 6, 4, 5, 1, 2, 9, 4)  sortWith ( _<_ ) take 5
res18: List[Int] = List(1, 1, 2, 3, 4)