Radix Exchange—An Internal Sorting Method for Digital Computers

This note describes a new technique—Radix Exchange—for sorting data internal to the high speed memory of an electronic binary digital computer. The technique is faster than Inserting by the ratio (log 2 n )/ n for sorting n = 2 c items with values distributed evenly in the range 0 to 2 c — 1. Its speed compares favorably with internal merging and it has the significant advantage of requiring essentially no working area in addition to that storage for the data being sorted and the instructions comprising the Radix Exchange routine itself. The nomenclature used is, in most cases, that of E. H. Friend [1].