Donald R. Cahela, Ph.D.
	Center for Microfibrous Materials Manufacturing
	Department of Chemical Engineering
	230 Ross Hall
	Auburn University, AL 36849
	caheldr@auburn.edu
	(334) 844-2026
	(334) 844-2085 (FAX)

Disclaimer:  The codes in this package are presented without any warranty as to their usefullness or applicability.  Use at your own risk.

Merge sort is an algorithm to sort data by merging previously sorted lists.  The implementation begins by putting the original list of values in lists with only two values.  These lists are each sorted before the merging is started.  Adjacent lists are then merged until only one list remains.  The merging operations could be written to exploit parrallelism with multiprocessor systems.  This cannot be done using Euphoria V3.0.  

A test code compares execution time to the shell sort included in RDS Euphoria.  The RDS sort.e function appears to be twice as fast as this implementation of merge sort for lists of less than 100,000 values.   For lists of 1,000,000 values the ratio increases to around ten to twenty fold.  Test results from running on my PC are included.  The shell sort appears to be superior to merge sorting.

First implementation written September 19, 2008.
