Re: [patch 1/13] Qsort

[Eric St-Laurent <ericstl34@sympatico.ca>]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 21:43 -0300, Horst von Brand wrote:
> AFAICS, this is just a badly implemented Shellsort (the 10/13 increment
> sequence starting with the number of elements is probably not very good,
> besides swapping stuff is inefficient (just juggling like Shellsort does
> gives you almost a third less copies)).
> 
> Have you found a proof for the O(n log n) claim?

"Why a Comb Sort is NOT a Shell Sort

A shell sort completely sorts the data for each gap size. A comb sort
takes a more optimistic approach and doesn't require data be completely
sorted at a gap size. The comb sort assumes that out-of-order data will
be cleaned-up by smaller gap sizes as the sort proceeds. "

Reference:

http://world.std.com/~jdveale/combsort.htm

Another good reference:

http://yagni.com/combsort/index.php

Personally, i've used it in the past because of it's small size.  With
C++ templates you can have a copy of the routine generated for a
specific datatype, thus skipping the costly function call used for each
compare.  With some C macro magic, i presume something similar can be
done, for time-critical applications.

Best regards,

Eric St-Laurent