ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER APRIL 1992 Software described here is now public domain and available from the Lima User Group (May 1995) -------------------------- "EASY SORT" ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE SORTING OF XB DATA STATEMENTS reviewed by Charles Good Lima Ohio User Group Many of us have our favorate extended basic name/address program, or household inventory program, or other "list of things" program. There are lots of these floating around in the TI community and the nice thing about them is that, since they are in XB, the inexperienced user can modify them to the user's particular requirements. These programs either load in a separate data file to sort and display or they contain their data in XB data statements. Many "only know how to program in XB" users use data statements in such software. The advantage of using data statements is that the data is loaded into the computer just as fast as the controlling program. There is no need to spend time loading the program and then loading a data file. One disadvantage of data statements is the haphazard unsorted order that the data is usually entered into the program. New data, irrespective of alphabetical or numerical order, is usually added after all the existing data statements. Reading all this data into memory and sorting it in XB takes alot of time. Bruce Harrison to the rescue! Bruce sent me an evaluation copy of a new commerical offering which sorts data in data statements FAST. No assembly language knowledge is needed, just use the SKELETON program or add the appropriate CALL LINK to your own software. SKELETON is very flexible. Many different kinds of data can be stored with a neat menu poping up at the start of SKELETON showing what the data is (video tapes, names and addresses, household inventory, etc). DATA statements can be part of the program, MERGEd into the program, or loaded in from a separate disk file. Bruce's disk includes a demo name/address program that contains the addresses of many prominant personalities in the TI community. The demo program itself is REALLY NEAT with quick sorting by first or last name, street address, city, state, or zip code. The list of TI personality's addresses is in and of itself useful to owners of TI home computers. Below are excerpts from the letter from Bruce that accompanied my evaluation copy of EASY DATA: "Here's our latest commercial offering, a little goodie we call EASY DATA. It's for unskilled XB programmers, so they can do great things with DATA statements and a little help from Harrison's Assenmbly routines. "The package sells for $6.00 including S&H for US and Canada customers. Its main ingredient is a routine called MSORT, which is supplied buried in the XB program SKELETON. That XB program also contains a slightly upgraded version of our Menu Driver (QMENU), so the unskilled programmer can make nice looking menus from simple DATA statements. "MSORT is a magical routine in many ways. It performs sorts by any two fields in the data, as designated in the LINK statement. The kind of sort performed (Numeric or String) is determined by the kind of variable that the field being sorted reports into. It does not waste time on the secondary sort unless the primary sort is a tie. "Three demos are provided. The one called BIGDEMO sorts 55 records of six fields each on two criteria in a bit over three seconds. [Charles Good note: BIGDEMO is the name/address demo mentioned by me above.]... The time required to sort is essentially insensitive to the original ordering of the data. Lists that are almost in order take no less time than lists that are completely reversed." Harrison Software 5705 40th Place Hyattsville MD 20781 301-277-3467