Subject: Re: [RRG] simplicity

From: "William Herrin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 00:13:02 -0400

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 10:31 PM, Lixia Zhang <[email-masked]> wrote:
> C. A. R. Hoare is a British computer scientist, probably best known
>  for the development of Quicksort (or Hoaresort), the world's most
>  widely used sorting algorithm, in 1960. One of his famous quotes is
>
>    "There are two ways of constructing a software design:
>     make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies,
>     and make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Quicksort fits the latter category, yes?

Bit of a merge-sort fan myself. It may not be cool, but it buys
stability, sequential access and evenly distributed parallelism with
less complexity and pretty much the same n log n price. In practice,
the 2n space complaint normally falls apart with a sensible use of
pointers.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ [email-masked] [email-masked]
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

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