Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!sgi!thant@horus.SGI.COM
From: thant@horus.SGI.COM (Thant Tessman)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Re: What kinds of keys do you sort?
Summary: sort any kind of keys
Message-ID: <32269@sgi.SGI.COM>
Date: 8 May 89 16:00:01 GMT
References: <7032@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Sender: daemon@sgi.SGI.COM
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 49

In article <7032@saturn.ucsc.edu>, koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes:
> A colleague and I are preparing a paper on a new sorting algorithm we've
> come up with.  It only works on certain kinds of keys, though, so I'm
> interested in getting a general feel for how useful it will be.  So, my
> question is this: In your applications, what datatypes do you commonly
> use as sort keys?  Character (text) strings, integers, floating point
> numbers, or what?  Please respond by E-mail, if possible; I will summarize
> to the net if there's interest.  (Sorry, I don't want to give out any
> details about our algorithm before it's published; just look what premature
> release did for Pons and Fleischmann! :)
> 
> Thanks for any information you can provide.
> 
> ---
> Steven Grimm				koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu
> Division of Social Sciences		uunet!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!koreth
> University of California, Santa Cruz	"Pithy quotes are for losers."


Allow the user to hand the sorting tools the comparison function to use on 
the keys.  That way you can sort anything.  C++ (a truely bitchin' language)
is built for this sort of thing.  You can of course do this in C and probably
many other languages.

I posted this to the net because I wanted to say that before I started using 
C++ the idea of reusing my own code (let alone anyone else's) turned my 
stomach.

To W. T. Wolfe and T. Dunning.

What exactly would an "intelligent software librarian" do?  I have seen 
software development environments that do "HyperCard" type things to link 
libraries to manuals to the code that refrences those libraries, etc.  The 
stuff was very neat, but only if the developers explicitly maintained all the 
interconnections.

How is the ADA COMMAND ENVIRONMENT better?  (The fact that it was comissioned
by the U.S. Government has me very skeptical about its usefulness.)

"... the most dramatic productivity gains in reuse will be realized through 
the development of libraries of components for specific domains, and 
structured according to explicit _domain_models_.  Such models can be realized
as detailed taxonomies of the objects and operations which are pertinent to 
the application domain to be served by the repository. ..."

It sounds like you've got to solve your software problem to solve your 
software problem.

thant@sgi.com "disclaimer"