Re: Anyone help develop an algorythm?

[NKSW39B@prodigy.com (Matthew Givens)]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
>
>Matthew said
>
><<>Your problem statement is unclear.  Are you saying your linked list 
has
>>N nodes, at each node is an array of some number of elements, each
>>element is a string of (equal) length L, and you want to treat is as a
>>great big array of strings of length L and you want to sort that big
>>array?P>>
>
>Yes exactly>>
>
>
>The question is what form do you want the output in? Do you want to
>construct an array of poiners? If so, then it is trivial to sort the
>array of pointers, using any standard sorting algorithm. Or do you want
>to sort in place keeping the linked list structure throughout -- in 
>that case a modified mrge sort is the only feasible answer (modified
>to deal with the multi-element nodes).

The structure of the data can't change.  The data must be sorted in place,
 not merged into a single list.  And the only merge sorts I know actually 
merge the data into a single list.  Just how do you modify a merge sort 
to sort the data in place?

-
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried. 
<< Iceman >>