Column 1: Cracking the Oyster
The programmer’s question was simple: “How do I sort a disk file?” Before I tell you how I made my first mistake, let me give you a chance to do better than I did. What would you have said?
1.1 A Friendly Conversation
My mistake was to answer his question. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of how to implement a Merge Sort on disk. My suggestion that he dig into an algorithms text met with less than enthusiasm — he was more concerned about solving the problem than furthering his education. I then told him about a disk sorting program in a popular programming book. The program consisted of about two hundred lines of code in a dozen functions; I estimated that implementing and testing the code would have taken the programmer ...
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