Re: Hoare's gripes about Ada (should be so what)

[Colin James 0621 <cjames@dsc.blm.gov>]

  
Ted Holden writes about what Tony Hoare says about Ada.  But Hoare is
not really qualified to have anything but an opinion, being a math
lecturer and not a software engineer (or that dirty word projammer).
  
When in seminary in the UK about ten years ago, I wrote Hoare regarding
an improvement in the pointer performance of his quicksort.  He did not
respond (no $'s ?), unusual for an Oxford don.  
  
But for those interested, I now have an optimized distribution counting
sort (unfortunately I was paid to write it in C since our C compiler did
not come with one).  It works in the same manner as sorting a deck of 
playing cards into suits first.  It is faster than quicksort for all
worst cases and is also stable (equal keys remain in the original order).
I'll share it with those interested since the taxpayer paid for it.
 
Since quicksort was made famous by Hoare (or vice versa), I wonder why
it is so universally used (especially in the C community) when Donald
Knuth's big 0 statistics clearly show distribution counting is faster.