Subj : Re: Sorting
To   : borland.public.cpp.borlandcpp
From : "Ed Mulroy [TeamB]" <dont_email_me@bitbuc.ket>
Date : Thu Dec 18 2003 05:38 am

I agree.  These days large hard drives, fast processors and large memory are
common and an N-way merge is more attractive than the 2-way merge that I
described.

> Scott wrote in message
> news:3fe12cfb.9228324@newsgroups.borland.com...
> ...
>  I used an N-way merge based on the idea that it would
> avoid a lot of unneccesary I/O.  N-way merging is just
> an extension of the basic merge technique that Ed
> Mulroy described, merging from many files instead of just
> two.  The number of input files may be limited by your
> OS, which is why it's an iterative process.  If you have more
> temp files than available file handles, you generate another
> temp file and re-do the merge process.  Eventually you'll
> have fewer temp files than available handles, at which point
> you can generate your final output.

.