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> Hmm, yes. The running time of a radix sort is proportional to the length
> of the keys, and regardless of the volume of data. Which means that even
> sorting a small volume of data could be quite slow if the keys are large.
Indeed, I think it's more suited to large volumes of data with relatively
small keys. I just thought the lack of random access meant it might be
quite well suited to tape drives.
> It also doesn't help that the keys I want to sort by are floating-point
> numbers... although I suppose you could truncate them to integers and do
> it that way.
Or do a radix sort on the mantissa part (which I guess is maximum 8 digits
or so), then on the exponent (3 digits?). That should be more efficient
than simply converting the float to an integer, especially if you have a
very wide range of values.
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