For my CS135 class at U.P., I gave a programming assignment to compare the performance of quicksort, heapsort, mergesort, and radixsort, on arrays of strings. Each string is of fixed size 16 characters, and the sort must be done on arrays of sizes 100000, 200000, 300000, ... , 900000, 1000000. The students are free to choose the operating system, and the programming language. I showed the class that the programming assignment can be done with Debian on 1GB ram, using Gnu C, by giving the class a demo of quicksort of the array of one million 16-character strings.
Among the problems that my students encountered and reported to me are the following: 1. You can not do the programming assignment on Windows, since the Windows development environment can not support such big arrays. 2. You can not do the programming assignment using Java on Linux, since Java-for-Linux does not support such big arrays. So the students are forced to use Linux, using C, C++ or any tool that allows management of large arrays. Unconsciously, I gave a programming assignment that promoted the use of Linux, and extolled the virtues of Linux, without making the advertisement so obvious. He he he . . . PManalastas _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
