[Chicago] Not exactly a solution, but....

[Lewit, Douglas]

Brad,

You're a genius!  That last email helped me fix my original program.
Hooray!!!  In this version I included a million comments because I'm going
to email this to a professor who really doesn't know Python that well.  So
the comments may help him to interpret the code a little better.  The only
"problem" is that my mergeSort program doesn't change the array "in
place".  Not a big deal really.  To permanently change the array you would
just do this:

array = [randint(0, 100) for i in range(20)] #### for example
array = mergeSort(array)
And presto!  It works!

The searching and sorting stuff is very cool and challenging, but I still
wish that CS professors would also teach some practical stuff, such as web
development and internet security, etc, etc.  I've noticed that if you're a
CS major they make you struggle through about 2 years of purely academic
and theoretical stuff before they start teaching the skills needed for
employment as a computer professional.  I mean the Merge Sort algorithm is
interesting, and I can see its value, but it would be nice if my professors
at the university would teach me how to test a website for security
weaknesses and practical stuff like that.  Oh well.  Maybe next semester,
right?

Again Brad, I really appreciate your help.  I love you guys at ChiPy!

Take care and have a great week.

Best,

Douglas.

P.S.  Regarding merge*S*ort vs. merge*s*ort, after three semesters of Java
programming at Northeastern it's the naming style that I've gotten used
to.  Probably not really a big deal, right?  It's just a matter of personal
preference.


On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 6:08 AM, Brad Martsberger <bradley.marts at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In fact, the algorithm that you implemented in this code is insertion
> sort. On each iteration you are "merging" a single element with a sorted
> list of your previously merged elements. That is, you insert a single
> element into your growing sorted list. This algorithm has time complexity
> O(n^2), mergesort will have time complexity O(n log n).
>
> Brad
>
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:29 AM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>
>> I sort of got my mergeSort program to work, but the problem is that the
>> algorithm isn't really mergeSort at all!  It uses merge, but my algorithm
>> is iterative rather than recursive, so it's not really a mergeSort.  It's a
>> merge-something, but not true mergeSort.  Oh well.  Any suggestions?
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Douglas.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chicago mailing list
>> Chicago at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chicago mailing list
> Chicago at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>
>
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