Sorting Arrays

[Dean]

I'm trying to come up with a fast sorting routine to sort
string arrays. I tried a quicksort and bubble sort (which
I admittedly borrowed from some posted source I found),
but I can't come close to the speed of the ARRAY SORT
function built into PB. I'm trying to stay away from PB,
but "just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in..."

I could use a hand if anyone can offer some FB code that will
perform as fast as PB's built in function, or at least come close.
In this PB example, on my PIII 1GHZ laptop, it takes
15.5 seconds to sort a 3 million element 7 byte string array.

#COMPILE EXE
#DIM ALL

FUNCTION PBMAIN () AS LONG

DIM X AS LONG
DIM Y AS LONG
DIM Z AS LONG
DIM S AS STRING
DIM TI1 AS DOUBLE
DIM TI2 AS DOUBLE

X = 3000000

DIM MyArray(X) AS STRING * 7

PRINT "Started loading array in descending order..."
FOR Z = X TO 1 STEP - 1
S = LTRIM$(STR$(Z))
IF LEN(S) < 7 THEN S = S + STRING$(7 - LEN(S), " ")
Y = Y + 1
MyArray(Y) = S
NEXT Z

PRINT "Started to sort array in ascending order..."
TI1 = TIMER
ARRAY SORT MyArray() : 'PB built in sorting function
TI2 = TIMER

PRINT "Time to sort array = ";TI2 - TI1; " seconds."
INPUT "Hit return to quit...", S

END FUNCTION

Dean