Design and characteristics of a variable-length record sort using new fixed-length record sorting techniques

  • Authors:

  • Martin A. Goetz

  • Affiliations:

  • Applied Data Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1963

  • Sorting

    ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)

Quantified Score

Hi-index 48.22

Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes the application of several new techniques for sorting fixed-length records to the problem of variable-length record sorting. The techniques have been implemented on a Sylvania 9400 computer system with 32,000 fixed-length words of memory. Specifically, the techniques sequence variable-length records of unrestricted size, produce long initial strings of data, merge strings of data at the power of T - 1, where T is the number of work tapes in a system, and do not restrict the volume of input data.