BruteSort

by J. McAfee

There are probably better sorts around for the Nascom, but either they are being kept a dark secret, or I have missed their publication (not a difficult trick in Saudi Arabia), so I decided to write my own. Being an ardent exponent of the art of coarse programming, my code owes nothing to elegance and even does a couple of naughties, hence the name, BruteSort.

I am not sure of the sorting jargon but I think it’s a modified Shell-Shuffle-Shuttle sort (or have I just invented a test of soberiety? Try saying that when you have had a few). The logic of the thing was taken from a BASIC listing in a magazine and there are probably more efficient algorithms around but I’ve found it adequate for my needs. No! Lets be honest, it impresses the hell out of me.

I’ll leave it to others to obtain accurate timings, but going by the kitchen clock, BruteSort takes about 3 seconds to sort a 1000 element array of random strings. This sorted array can then be sorted into descending order in about 1.6 seconds while it takes a dazzling 0.9 seconds to resort the array with one element out of sequence. All these timings were on a machine running at 4MHz.

The code sits at A000H and is 12BH bytes long, so remember when initialising BASIC that ‘Memory Size ?’ must not exceed 40960.

There are several ways in which BruteSort can be used. Lets take the following string as a typical example in the array dimensioned DA$(500).

“25402088LOGS J LONDON SORTER ”

This string is a concatenation of four fields:

To sort the entire array by name (omitting the zeroeth element, but BruteSort can handle it a you wish)…

A=USR(0)DA$(1),500,9,23,A

…will do the trick provided that A does not evaluate to -1. If it does then a descending sort will be returned.

Let’s say, for some unfathomable reason, we wish to sort