A Pointless Derivation of Radixsort

Abstract

This paper is about point-free (or `pointless') calculations — calculations performed at the level of function composition instead of that of function application. We address this topic with the help of an example, namely calculating the radix-sort algorithm from a more obvious specification of sorting. The message that we hope to send is that point-free calculations are sometimes surprisingly simpler than the corresponding point-wise calculations.