the same way starting with five-way merge to and so on although this scheme seems to be inferior to polyphase because at times it chooses to leave some sequences idleand because it involves simple copy operationsit surprisingly is superior to polyphase for (verylarge files and for six or more sequences write well structured program for the cascade merge principle references [ betz and carter proc acm national conf ( )paper [ floyd treesort (algorithms and comm acm no ( ) and comm acm no ( ) [ gilstad polyphase merge sorting an advanced technique proc afips eastern jt comp conf ( ) - [ hoare proof of programfind comm acm no ( ) - [ hoare proof of recursive programquicksort comp no ( ) - [ hoare quicksort comp no ( ) - [ knuth the art of computer programming vol readingmass addisonwesley [ lorin guided bibliography to sorting ibm syst no ( ) - [ shell highspeed sorting procedure comm acm no ( ) - [ singleton an efficient algorithm for sorting with minimal storage (algorithm comm acm no ( ) [ van emden increasing the efficiency of quicksort (algorithm comm acm no ( ) - [ williams heapsort (algorithm comm acm no ( ) -