Re: Recapping on “Bug Sort”.

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Austin Obyrne writes on comp.lang.ada:
> how in the real world would you input the data from another source
> i.e. beyond your control, to your 'Count Sort' program. It would have
> to be keyed in somewhere by a human operator??

Or multiple human operators.  Or automatic radar plots.  Or some
temperature, pressure, position, wavelength or whatever, sampled by
automatic sensors, 1000 samples per second.  Really, generating data is
not a problem.

Note that the Unix "sort" program reads from standard input, which may
be a file on a local disk, a file on a remote array of disks, or a pipe
fed by some arbitrarily complex combination of programs.  The "problem"
when reading from standard input is that you can't rewind or push back
into standard input.  Once you have read a byte from it, you can't read
it again, you *must* process it immediately or store it in memory.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.