A pointless derivation of radix sort

  • Authors:

  • Jeremy Gibbons

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK (e-mail: jgibbons@brookes.ac.uk)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Functional Programming
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper is about point-free (or ‘pointless’) calculations – calculations performed at the level of function composition instead of that of function application. We address this topic with the help of an example, namely calculating the radix-sort algorithm from a more obvious specification of sorting. The message that we hope to send is that point-free calculations are sometimes surprisingly simpler than the corresponding point-wise calculations.