Slate (writing) expensive. Slate (writing) A slate is a thin piece of hard flat material, such as the rock also called slate, that is used as a medium for writing. The rock is “a metamorphic rock created by the recrystallization of the minerals in shale from clay to parallel-aligned, flat, flake-like minerals such as mica”. The writing slate consisted of a piece of slate, typically either 4x6 inches or 7x10 inches, encased in a wooden frame. A precise date range for writing slates of this type has not been established. Usually, a piece of cloth or slate sponge was used to clean
Merge sort Merge sort In computer science, merge sort (also commonly spelled mergesort) is an efficient, general-purpose, comparison-based sorting algorithm. Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the order of equal elements is the same in the input and output. Merge sort is a divide and conquer algorithm that was invented by John von Neumann in 1945. A detailed description and analysis of bottom-up mergesort appeared in a report by Goldstine and von Neumann as early as 1948. Conceptually, a merge sort works as follows: Example C-like code using indices for top-down merge sort algorithm that recursively splits the list