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On 16/06/11 22:11, Martijn Grooten wrote: > Came across this yesterday. Definitely not the fastest search > algorithm but probably the nicest I've ever seen. I like it, but it is the Lisp programmer sweep it under someone else's carpet.... i.e. they passes all the hard work to the OS. This is just pigeon-hole sorting using time (or rather scheduler) instead of locations. Possibly it tells us we spend too long looking at comparison sorts, when the need to fit it all in the same amount of space is much reduced these days. My education was similarly dominated by resource strained computing algorithms, I remember being bewildered by the explanation of LU decomposition of matrices (not how it worked, but why this way) till it was explained the big benefit is you can overwrite the original matrix with the decomposition as you go, and suddenly I understood it is for numerical problems that fill available memory Still good to refresh my memory about sort algorithms, it has been a long time since I worried about what "sort" did in any programs, I just trust the libraries/languages to do something sensible. PS: I get very irritated if programs have table sorting by clicking on column headers and the sort is not stable, so please don't do it! -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq