> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Stark [mailto:james_stark03 at hotmail.com]
> 
> I can confrim that this algorithm does not work - its crap.  

You've lost me here.  Are you saying that the quicksort algorithm is
invalid?  Quicksort has been demonstrated to be an excellent sorting
algorithm since it was first published back in, what, the early '60's
sometime?  If you've found a problem with it which has not been adequately
discussed in the literature over the past forty years you should certainly
write it up - I imagine that any of the reputable journals would be eager to
publish your results following peer review.  I'm sure that such a formal
analysis would be of great interest to many people.  I ran some tests on the
code you posted and for random arrays with up to 1 million elements the sort
was correct.  What problem have you discovered?

> It starts from 
> the middle?  thats not how quicksort is meant to work, its 
> meant to start 
> from the sides (left and right) and when they cross over it 
> meant to assign 
> the pivot value.  Actually its meant to assign the pivot 
> value to the left 
> to start off with.

If memory serves you can choose any element as the pivot.  Some choices may
be better than others.  Isn't choosing the left-most element as the initial
pivot likely to make the run time O(N^2) if your data is already sorted or
nearly so?  Similar problem with choosing the right-most if the data is
sorted in descending order.

> If any of you guys have developed any other algortihms it would be 
> interesting to do a trace.  Like a binary tree sort (is that more 
> efficient?) I dont know... just traced that one - made no sense.

What is it that made no sense?

Bob Jarvis
Compuware @ Timken


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