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From: "Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com>
Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn
 C or Pascal?]
Date: 1996/08/22
Message-ID: <01bb903b$be2fe260$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>#1/1
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references: <31FBC584.4188@ivic.qc.ca>
 <01bb83f5$923391e0$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>
 <4uah1k$b2o@solutions.solon.com>
 <01bb853b$ca4c8e00$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>
 <4udb2o$7io@solutions.solon.com>
 <01bb8569$9910dca0$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>
 <4urqam$r9u@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <01bb8b84$200baa80$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>
 <4vbbf6$g0a@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <01bb8f18$713e0e60$32ee6fce@timhome2>
 <4vgs4j$evl@news.accessone.com>
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newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-08-22T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Bengt Richter <bokr@accessone.com> wrote in article
<4vgs4j$evl@news.accessone.com>...
> "Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com> wrote:
> [...]
> >Wait, hold the phone!  "Sorts the data without moving it"?  What,
> >is APL's sorting algorithm O(1)?  Yes, it may not actually get
> >sorted until it gets printed, but that's irrelevent to the fact
> >that it eventually gets sorted.
> 	Does that mean that your concept of the essential aspect of
> sorting is putting the data into sort order, rather than establishing
> the order itself? The respective timings say otherwise to me ;-)

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if I have a data set,
and I set a bit that says "this data set has the property of
being ordered", then technically I have an ordered data set in
O(1) time.  Now, if I do an add reduction (terminology?), the
sorting doesn't actually have to be done, and I've saved some
CPU cycles.

But all that's not the point.  If my point is to take a vector as
input, order it, and then display it on the screen, the vector
will be sorted.  And sorting something requires moving it into
a sorted order.

-- Tim Behrendsen (tim@airshields.com)