Coney-catching Coney-catching Coney-catching is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled "conny"), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief or con man. It was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals." The term was first used in print by
Selection sort small arrays (i.e. fewer than 10–20 elements). A useful optimization in practice for the recursive algorithms is to switch to insertion sort or selection sort for "small enough" sublists. Heapsort greatly improves the basic algorithm by using an implicit heap data structure to speed up finding and removing the lowest datum. If implemented correctly, the heap will allow finding the next lowest element in Θ(log "n") time instead of Θ("n") for the inner loop in normal selection sort, reducing the total running time to Θ("n" log "n"). A bidirectional variant of selection sort, called cocktail sort, is an algorithm which