Created an iterative approach for quicksort which limits stack size to logn

sorting/quickSort.py

@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ def quick_sort_accumulation(data, a):
         return a
     less, equal, greater = partition(data)
     return quick_sort_accumulation(less,
-                                   equal + quick_sort_accumulation(greater, a))
+                equal + quick_sort_accumulation(greater, a))
 
 
 def quicksort(data):
@@ -59,5 +59,53 @@ def quicksort(data):
     return quick_sort_accumulation(data, [])
 
 
+def iterative_partition(data, left, right):
+    """
+    Function which partitions the data into two segments,
+    the left which is less than the pivot and the right
+    which is greater than the pivot. The pivot for this
+    algo is the right most index. This function returns
+    the ending index of the pivot.
+
+    :param data: array to be sorted
+    :param left: left most portion of array to look at
+    :param right: right most portion of the array to look at
+    """
+    x = data[right]
+    i = left - 1
+    j = left
+    while j < right:
+        if data[j] <= x:
+            i = i + 1
+            data[i], data[j] = data[j], data[i]
+        j = j+1
+    data[i + 1], data[right] = data[right], data[i + 1]
+    return i + 1
+
+
+def iterative_quick_sort(data):
+    """
+    In place implementation of quick sort
+
+    Wrapper function for iterative_quick_sort_helper which
+    initalizes, left, right to be the extrema of the array.
+    """
+    iterative_quick_sort_helper(data, 0, len(data) -1)
+    return data
+
+
+def iterative_quick_sort_helper(data, left, right):
+    """
+    Uses the divide and conquer algo to sort an array
+
+    :param data: array of data
+    :param left: left index bound for sorting
+    :param right: right bound for sorting
+    """
+    if left < right:
+        pivot = iterative_partition(data, left, right)
+        iterative_quick_sort_helper(data, left, pivot -1)
+        iterative_quick_sort_helper(data, pivot+1, right)
+
 
-print quicksort([1,3,1,5,7,9,2,3,5,5,6])
+print iterative_quick_sort([1,3,1,5,7,9,2,3,5,5,6])