Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!postnews.google.com!news1.google.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: Mon, 28 May 2012 07:18:14 -0500 Message-ID: <4FC36D04.357C@mindspring.com> Date: Mon, 28 May 2012 08:18:12 -0400 From: pete Reply-To: pfiland@mindspring.com Organization: PF X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.04Gold (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Open letter to Ian Collins References: <4FC26A8F.5DEB@mindspring.com> <4FC29D4A.DDC@mindspring.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 28 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 4.156.228.107 X-Trace: sv3-WRyfvVDkiVVUk9vG7CfVKpI5PH+3h3MJ5h9rENS3g9xjWdmj5zM5hbmoU5wiXSeNN2bUTM+Kj1QTO1j!fGbyoLwyth4SWzVe2B3BbXZqww/cuMo4ScNAcnYOgBv3Nyh6PWqfAAUYXds8Q8U6ZWDonr/QqdER!dzeZjgySnEA= 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: 2217 X-Received-Bytes: 2398 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:21466 Philip Lantz wrote: > > pete wrote: > > What I want to say, is that what you wrote: > > > > "With the generic qsort function > > you would directly compare the data > > (without function calls) by specifying a macro > > for comparing your data. > > For integers it would be simply > > > > a - b" > > > > doesn't correspond to any notion > > of what "generic qsort function" could possibly mean. > > You misunderstood. The qsort function is generic. > The comparison macro isn't generic, > it is specific to the data being sorted. > "a - b" could be a valid comparison macro > for some data sets where the range of the data is known. > However, Jacob did overgeneralize a bit when he said that it > would be appropriate "for integers", without further qualification. Thank you. -- pete