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Date: Sun, 6 Dec 87 23:23:19 est
From: hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Josh Hodas)


Fellow Hyperhackers:

    I am in need of a fast method for sorting a field line by line.
I have implemented standard selection sort but its a dog (495 seconds for
175 lines on a Mac II) and have attempted quicksort but it dies with
"too much recursion" or "too many variables" if the field has more than 
 about 15 lines.  I may try shellsort tomorrow; but even if it works, 
it is likely to be slow if written in hypertalk.

	What I really need is a simple xfcn that sorts a given text field.
It should be really simple to implement, I simply haven't got the tools
as yet (still picking a compiler).  

	Has anyone out there written or seen such a function?  Any
help would be greatly apreciated.

				Thanks,
				Josh Hodas
				Hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu

PS:  It seems rather horrible that hypertalk should die on such shallow
     recursion.  any clues?



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sorting fields