Re: Beginer problem: variable array size

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> Does C++ also have a built-in Sort primitive ?

C++ has sorting algorithms as part of its standard library.
It's got a regular sort, a stable sort, a partial sort,
and a couple of related things. They're all written as
templates, so the compare and swap portions can be inlined,
giving much better performance than the old C qsort which
uses a pointer to function to do comparisons.

I think I'm becoming more used to Ada :-) When I saw the
problem posed by the OP, I immediately thought of using
a recursive function that built up and returned arrays,
similar to what tmoran posted.

MDC wrote:
 > The reality is that by putting a requirement out there
 > that there must be no limit on the number of elements
 > accepted, you create a difficulty that doesn't normally
 > exist in the real world.

I've talked about this before. Until the GNU people came
along and rewrote the UNIX text utilities, they would
constantly and inconsistently return wrong results because
of arbitrary limits, such as maximum line sizes. To this day,
I cannot use vi on a Sun in an xterm that is "too wide". I
have had text files with lines that were longer than 100000
characters which I needed to process. Wiring arbitrary limits
into a program because you think that they are large enough
for all uses is a recipe for disaster.