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Date: 1 Sep 93 03:03:49 GMT
From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net  (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: Hoare's gripes about Ada (should be so what)
Message-ID: <1993Sep1.030349.9524@seas.gwu.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <9308252104.aa09026@dsc.blm.gov> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 062
1) writes:
>
>  
>Ted Holden writes about what Tony Hoare says about Ada.  But Hoare is
>not really qualified to have anything but an opinion, being a math
>lecturer and not a software engineer (or that dirty word projammer).
>  
>When in seminary in the UK about ten years ago, I wrote Hoare regarding
>an improvement in the pointer performance of his quicksort.  He did not
>respond (no $'s ?), unusual for an Oxford don.  

People like Ted are the kind who are always dumping on professors but
have mo hesitation about quoting them selectively.
>  
>But for those interested, I now have an optimized distribution counting
>sort (unfortunately I was paid to write it in C since our C compiler did
>not come with one).  It works in the same manner as sorting a deck of 
>playing cards into suits first.  It is faster than quicksort for all
>worst cases and is also stable (equal keys remain in the original order).
>I'll share it with those interested since the taxpayer paid for it.
> 
I'll take a copy. An Ada version could turn up in an insanely great
data structures book. You'll get full credit, of course.

>Since quicksort was made famous by Hoare (or vice versa), I wonder why
>it is so universally used (especially in the C community) when Donald
>Knuth's big 0 statistics clearly show distribution counting is faster.
>
Hey Ted, what's big O?

Mike Feldman