Quick- and Mergesort in one line of Python

One-liners are always fun, so as a challenge I decided to implement both Quicksort and Mergesort in one line of Python, one line meaning one expression, no semicolons and no eval(). Quicksort was relatively straightforward, since it only really requires one operation applied recursively:



Mergesort however was more of a challenge. The problem is the merging of two sorted lists - this requires a loop, which is not trivial to implement inside of another recursive function in just one expression. Luckily though, the the process of merging can be achieved through recursion, and so we can pack it into a lambda expression that is called recursively.
We then still have the problem of having a lambda expression call itself inside of another lambda expression - it took some searching, but eventually I found a solution: a Z-combinator.

(lambda f: (lambda x: f(lambda *args: x(x)(*args)))(lambda x: f(lambda *args: x(x)(*args))))

This expression will take as an argument a function that is to be called recursively, and do exactly that. It allows for recursion with anonymous function. So now, all we need to do is pass the merge function to the Z combinator, and then call the resulting expression with the (recursively) mergesorted first and second half  of our list. Here'e the code:


Looks complicated, but you can see that the first lambda is just the Z combinator, followed by a rather long lambda on the variable m, this is our merge function. The reason for all the or and and's is the they are used to replace (if ... else ...) statements, since we can't nest these arbitrarily in lambdas. Also, the (r.append(a[0]) or a.remove(a[0]) or m(a,b,r)) statements simply return the third element (the recursive function call), since append() and remove() simply return none, and (none or [list] ) returns [list] in Python. This is a neat little hack that can be used to not only combine expressions but also to add return values to functions that otherwise return None.

Note that the Mergesort function here is highly recursive, I could only sort lists of around 330 elements before reaching maximum recursion depth. It is still reasonably fast however, taking around 0.004 seconds to sort 330 elements. Quicksort is much faster though, with 0.0002 seconds for the same list.