LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Shell Sort
built 114 days ago
The shell sort is a "diminishing increment sort", better known as a "comb sort" to the unwashed programming masses. The algorithm makes multiple passes through the list, and each time sorts a number of equally sized sets using the Insertion Sort. The size of the set to be sorted gets larger with each pass through the list, until the set consists of the entire list. (Note that as the size of the set increases, the number of sets to be sorted decreases.)
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The idea of the Shell sort is to rearrange the file to give it the property that taking every hth element (starting anywhere) yields a sorted file. Such a file is said to be h-sorted.
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Shell sort developed by Donald L. Shell is a non-stable in-place sort. Shell sort improves on the efficiency of insertion sort by quickly shifting values to their destination. Average sort time is
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As the graph pretty plainly shows, the bubble sort is grossly inefficient, and the shell sort blows it out of the water. Notice that the first horizontal line in the plot area is 100 seconds - these aren't sorts that you want to use for huge amounts of data in an interactive application. Even using the shell sort, users are going to be twiddling their thumbs if you try to sort much more than 10,000 data items.
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This is source code for what is meant to be an efficient implementation of Shell Sort in 6502 assembler. This implementation can sort more than 32,000 16-bit values. The only reason it can't sort 32,767 values is that there still has to be room for the routine and a few bytes for temporary storage. There's presently no other sorting routine in the repository that can handle more than 256 values. The source code is in a format suitable for the excellent and free ACME cross-assembler by Marco Baye, but should be easy to convert for other assemblers.
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Shell Sort