Algorithm::Networksort version 1.00
===================================

This module will create sorting networks, a sequence of comparisons
that do not depend upon the results of prior comparisons.

Since the sequences and their order never change, they can be very
useful if deployed in hardware, or used in software with a compiler
that can take advantage of parallelism.  However, the arrangement of
the comparisons is fixed according to the number of elements to be
sorted, so a network cannot be used as a generic sort like
quicksort.

There are several algorithms to generate sorting networks.  This
module has three of them:  Bose and Nelson's, Hibbard's, and
Batcher's Merge Exchange.  It also has networks that were found
to be superior in comparison count to those generated automatically
by these algorithms.

There is a flexible formatting function that will allow you to
print out your network in many ways (see documentation).  There
is also a graphical output function that will return the network
in an encapsulated postscript, SVG, or text form.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires no other modules and libraries.  If you want
to view the SVG output, good starting points would be Adobe's SVG
plug-in for web browsers or Apache's Batik project for Java.
Postscript viewing is easily accomplished with GNU's ghostview program.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2003 John M. Gamble. All rights reserved. This program is
free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
terms as Perl itself.