Superfast Software Inc. was founded last year by three young programmers.
They all dreamed their company would become a really big one and would
distribute a large number of software products all over the world. Thus, they
decided to use 64-bit integers to represent their inventory codes. Since it is just
a one-year-old company, the inventory database now contains only 2000 distinct
product codes, in the range from 1 to 3000. At this time they need to sort these
codes and one of the co-founders suggests using a general comparison-based
O(n log n)-time sorting algorithm such as heap-sort. But another co-founder
disagrees and suggests using radix-exchange sort because it is a so-called "linear
time" (that is, O(n)) algorithm.
Do you think radix exchange sort is good for this case? Explain your answer.
