Bubble Sort and Array Sorting | Dataford Interview Questions

Yochana's event processing service receives an unsorted list of integer priorities. Implement an algorithm that returns the priorities in ascending order without calling Python's built-in sort() or sorted() functions.

Your solution should use a divide-and-conquer sorting technique and handle duplicate, negative, and zero values. The input list must not be modified.

Formal Specification

Implement sort_priorities(priorities).

Input: priorities, a list of integers.
Output: A new list containing the same values as priorities, sorted in nondecreasing order.
Do not use sort(), sorted(), or another library sorting implementation.
The algorithm should run in O(n log n) time in the worst case.

Constraints

0 <= len(priorities) <= 200,000
-10^9 <= priorities[i] <= 10^9
The input list must remain unchanged
Do not use sort(), sorted(), or another library sorting implementation

Function Signature

def sort_priorities(priorities):

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