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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: WE NEED A GOOD Ada SORT PACKAGE!
Date: 5 Nov 1994 00:43:30 -0500
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
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Date: 1994-11-05T00:43:30-05:00
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Jahn, the idea of doing quicksort directly on a disk gives me a headache
just thinking about the poor disk arm!

no, you definitely can't do this if you are interested in efficiency,
even on disk files you definitely need some multi-phase merge sort.
For Realia-COBOL, I implemented the disk sort with a 64 way polyphase
merge, and it seems to be the fastest external sort around, or at least
was at the time I was paying attention to COBOL!