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In the merge sort algorithm, this subroutine is typically used to merge two sub-arrays A[lo..mid], A[mid+1..hi] of a single array A. This can be done by copying the sub-arrays into a temporary array, then applying the merge algorithm above. [1] The allocation of a temporary array can be avoided, but at the expense of speed and programming ease.
[2] The three-way merge looks for sections which are the same in only two of the three files. In this case, there are two versions of the section, and the version which is in the common ancestor "C" is discarded, while the version that differs is preserved in the output. If "A" and "B" agree, that is what appears in the output.
The k-way merge problem consists of merging k sorted arrays to produce a single sorted array with the same elements.Denote by n the total number of elements. n is equal to the size of the output array and the sum of the sizes of the k input arrays.
[1] LISP, standing for list processor, was created by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at MIT and in 1960 he published its design in a paper in the Communications of the ACM, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I". One of LISP's major data structures is the linked list.
This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2). [1]
A more complicated example is given by recursive descent parsers, which can be naturally implemented by having one function for each production rule of a grammar, which then mutually recurse; this will in general be multiple recursion, as production rules generally combine multiple parts. This can also be done without mutual recursion, for ...
The divide-and-conquer technique is the basis of efficient algorithms for many problems, such as sorting (e.g., quicksort, merge sort), multiplying large numbers (e.g., the Karatsuba algorithm), finding the closest pair of points, syntactic analysis (e.g., top-down parsers), and computing the discrete Fourier transform . [1]
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...