implementations incorporate techniques that restore robustness by effectively disabling older-first collection in cases where degradation occurs, and this dissertation discusses further measures the collectors may take to avoid performance degradation. i I thank my committee members, Mitchell Wand, Rajmohan Rajaraman and Eliot Moss, and particularly my advisor, Will Clinger, for their participation, comments and help. Will Clinger also contributed in many ways over many years to Larceny, my experimental system, most obviously by writing the Twobit compiler for Scheme. The benchmarks used in this dissertation were written or modified by or in other ways contributed to by Henry Baker, Hans Boehm, Bob Boyer, Will Clinger, David Detlefs, John Ellis, Marc Feeley, Richard Gabriel, Pete Kovac, Eugene Luks, and Richard O'Keefe. The work was supported in part by NSF Grant CCR-9629801 and by the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. The most profound thanks still go to m

Abstract. This paper is devoted to the “Discovery of Slowness. ” The archetypical perversely awful algorithm bogo-sort, which is sometimes referred to as Monkey-sort, is analyzed with elementary methods. Moreover, practical experiments are performed. 1