Java Glossary

Last updated 1998 July 15 by Roedy Green ©1996-1998 Canadian Mind Products.

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QuickSort
C.A.R. Hoare's recursive sorting technique. It works with a pivot element, moving all keys smaller than the pivot to one side and all the keys bigger to the other. Then it recursively sorts each half. QuickSort can be pathologically slow if the data are already ordered. In Java, QuickSort is slower than either HeapSort or RadixSort. Typical QuickSort implementations are unstable since they scramble keys to avoid pathological pre-orderings. Free Java source code is available from Roedy Green at Canadian Mind Products. To learn more about QuickSort's behaviour see Eppstein's paper. QuickSort source code download.. See Sort, HeapSort, RadixSort.



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