Bubble sort may work if Alex's lists are as short as those in his
example, but is one of the slowest sorts known. Sorting 6400 random
strings in Excel 2001 VBA on an 800 mhz Powerbook:
Bubble 164 sec; stable
Selection 61 sec; stable
Insertion 33 sec; stable
Comb 0.62 sec
Shell 0.54 sec
Heap 0.52 sec
Merge 0.38 sec; stable
Quick 0.24 sec
Radix 0.20 sec; stable
The only virtues of bubble sort are that it's simple and sorts stably,
but the same is true of insertion sort, which is five times faster:
Sub InsertionSort(A())
Dim LO&, HI&, I&, J&, V
LO = LBound(A): HI = UBound(A)
For I = LO + 1 To HI
V = A(I)
For J = I To LO + 1 Step -1
If V < A(J - 1) Then A(J) = A(J - 1) Else Exit For
Next J
A(J) = V
Next I
End Sub
This assumes values from both ranges have been read into array A().
Dave Ring
