Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail
NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:03:14 -0500
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:02:47 -0700
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110812 Thunderbird/6.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: Using Java Classes to Sort a Small Array Quickly
References: <86c4a53b-1ca1-48a8-b954-c01bd449278a@s35g2000prm.googlegroups.com> <4e5f4baa$0$2497$db0fefd9@news.zen.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <4e5f4baa$0$2497$db0fefd9@news.zen.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID: <peudnc1ZgYPv-8LTnZ2dnUVZ_uidnZ2d@earthlink.com>
Lines: 33
X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.230.204.158
X-Trace: sv3-3HQJiJ7MHRwh2dL6Wq4Td2PSRuCr+Ufj/hu0xfKLmnZLySrsJqRE2NhJgl2j9yOUqdNAGY7XkF47feU!UQvcbrgzyLGdraSNGNo33sAveCg7/u4DhJNtE1+/hLoMQO6aYnG34RR4hDZgJavctC1sv0cwaL1L!3jCxLfARWvfwmf36lZoJDCTbbTBbI8byjuGF41Cc9PbVSA8=
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
X-Postfilter: 1.3.40
X-Original-Bytes: 2644
Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:7522

On 9/1/2011 2:08 AM, RedGrittyBrick wrote:
> On 01/09/2011 03:48, KevinSimonson wrote:
>> I have an<enum> named<ProjectEnum> that has twelve values. Today I
>> added an instance variable to it, a<String> named<collectionTitle>.
>> The engineer I'm working with asked me to write a static method in
>> class<ProjectEnum> that returns an array of<ProjectEnum>s sorted
>> alphabetically by this value<collectionTitle>.
>>
>>
>> is there a way in Java to
>> sort an array of<String>s (or perhaps more to the point to sort an
>> array of<ProjectEnum>s) that runs in O(N) time? Or even that runs in
>> O(N^2) time but faster than InsertionSort? I'd appreciate any
>> information anyone can give me on this.
>
>
> If I was sorting twelve elements, I would consider myself utterly
> deranged if I found myself worrying about the sort algorithm.
>
>
>
> If the static method will be called millions of times per second, you
> might want to cache the sort results rather than pointlessly repeating
> the sort, but only after measuring a performance problem and working out
> if this method really needs to be called that often.
>

The simplest solution to this would be to use Arrays.sort, and forget
about it. If anything else, such as caching, is needed, there will be a
reminder in the form of Arrays.sort taking a significant fraction of the
run time.

Patricia