midfield:
hi --
thanks for the useful comments! i will definitely go through them carefully. unfortunately for this code (but fortunately for me) i defend my dissertation on monday so i'm a little distracted right now.....
i'm more than happy to donate this code or whatever improvements happen to it. actually, hGetContentsWithCursor seems like a candidate for inclusion with Data.ByteStrings or Data.Binary or something -- it seems like it might find other uses. (i think you liked that bit of code because i ripped it off of you guys! it's very short hamming
Can't fault that style ;)
distance from the original.) anyhow, all that will have to wait a couple weeks or so. also i've never cabalized anything so i may come begging for help.
We have a tutorial for that, luckily: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_write_a_Haskell_program And a tool to automate it, mkcabal, so should be fairly straightforward.
at some point i thought i saw how to do recursive external sort, to keep memory usage truly constant, but with my current lack of sleep i have lost that illusion. i'm also curious about the performance characteristics of this vs Prelude sort vs the version using the tournament mergesort apfelmus suggested. i need to find a computer with a lot more RAM than my weakling laptop. finally, it would be good to be able to have the blocksize controlled by Kb of RAM rather than # of elements, not sure how to get that information.
ultimately this was part of my project to write lucene for haskell. i think with this out of the way, plus all the Data.Binary / ByteString goodness, it shouldn't take too long. keep writing good libraries for me!
Great. Good to see things working. -- Don