Re: Sorting an array. Fastest way.
Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> wrote:
LinkedList has very slow access, but fast insert and delete.
That's an advantage for the OP. They can delete the obsolete item and insert
the new one relatively quickly. They certainly should not shift elements
manually with LinkedList.
That was surely, why the OP came up with it.
(remember? you asked, why he did)
I thought that might be, but their discussion of explicitly shifting elements
gave counter-evidence to that notion.
But as I said, the b-search will not "work" with
Lists, therefore the TreeSet is probably better.
But then, the OP showed that he isn't yet comfortable
with generics, and other since-1.5 features, so
probably he rather stick to array-shifting for now,
and study the java-1.5 goodies, before actually using
any other collection-class.
Generics are not essential to the Collections classes, which came out well
before generics were added to the language. Since array-shifting was the
original problem, the OP might not want to stick with it.
TreeSet will not allow duplicate entries, whereas Lists will. If they don't
need to maintain duplicates, a Set is a good idea, otherwise a LinkedList or
one of the Apache commons collections may solve the problem.
However, given the operations the OP described, there may be no sufficiently
quick solution using Sets or Lists. Eric Sosman's idea to build a heap seems
like the solution.
--
Lew
P.S., I apologize for the accidental misspelling of Andreas's name earlier.