sort.c does a whole lot of fancy stuff, but lacks explanations for it. Even the most basic question, "why does sort use a merge sort", is not answered. I tried to find out by reading through the archives of bug-coreutils and bug-textutils, but failed. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but not to me (I start to wonder if a more trieish sorting algorithm might win sometimes).
Some extreme hairiness: My understanding is limited, but it looks like numbers may be recomputed for -g every time two lines are compared. Once these numbers are calculated, they should really be stored. default_sort_size does not give any meaningful explanation of the hard-coded constants it contains, or of much else for that matter. sort_buffer_size has a comment saying, among other things, "Do not exceed a bound on the size: if the bound is not specified by the user, use a default." This is less than illuminating. Temporary files are not deleted immediately upon creation: is there a reason for this? I don't see documentation on what exactly the temporary files are _for_. The entire program is smashed into one file, with all the constants and global variables on top. It would be far easier to understand what is going on if it were broken up into pieces, so the global variables relating to a particular function could appear somewhere remotely near it. David Feuer _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
