January 1960 - Vol. 3 No. 1

In a recent note1, D. L. Shell has described a high-speed sorting procedure for lists contained in internal memory. The method has the great virtues of requiring no additional memory space and being considerably faster than other such methods, which require a time proportional to the square of the list length. The present authors have studied the statistics of Shell's method and have found a minor modification which increases its speed still further.