From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 21:04:08 MDT From: Colin James 0621 Subject: Re: Hoare's gripes about Ada (should be so what) Message-ID: <9308252104.aa09026@dsc.blm.gov> List-Id: 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. 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. 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.