INMC 80 News

Feedback – 4

Dr. L.C. Waring of Holywood, Co. Down sent me a tape of his “Tomcat” Editor Assembler which uses the TDL mnemonics – and he has versions for early monitors and Nas-Sys. So far, I’ve only had a single try at making it work. With my usual skill, I managed to produce all possible error messages in no time at all. If the same thing happens next time I try to use it, I suppose I’ll have to read the instructions! It is hardly necessary to add that I suggested he submit it for inclusion in the program library.

Other people have written interesting letters, and I hope they aren’t offended by not being mentioned. Now for some of my own work.

Sorting It Out.

There are many ways of sorting data into order, the fastest I have seen is the “Quicksort”. The version below is adapted from a demonstration for the Commodore Pet (whatever that is) printed in the Liverpool Software Gazette (nearly as good as this magazine).

If you want to sort more than 255 items, the array ST() should be larger. DIM ST(30,2) will allow you to sort much larger arrays, whereupon time taken is extended considerably. It remains much faster than a “Bubblesort” however. The same program will sort strings, if A() is changed to A$(), X to X$ and W to W$. At 2MHz it takes about 10 seconds to sort fifty words.