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There is no reason why the Spectrum should not usefully appear in offices, shops and workshops, particularly when the Microdrives and interfaces for good quality printers become generally available.

In such settings, most applications will entail handling data such as stock details, invoicing information, mailing lists and so on.

Usually in such cases the records will have to be sorted to meet the needs of the user. Sorting by conventional Basic methods is very slow, and this is where Allsort comes to the aid of the programmer.

It writes a machine code program to merge into your own host program to enable very quick sorting of data held in Basic arrays.

The package consists of a user manual, generator program and demonstration programs.

On loading, you are presented with a demonstration screen which you amend to suit your needs by pressing the relevant keys which are prompted.

You can then copy the screen definition to a printer. After this Allsort generates the sort program which is two lines of Basic to be saved on tape for subsequent merger with your own data handling program.

There are two types of sort available. Single with one array, and multi to enable sorts on up to four arrays in parallel on up to four keys.

A demonstration program with the package sorts 1,200 recods of 32 characters each in nine seconds, which is pretty impressive. A further demonstration sorted 20 records each with 16 fields in literally the blink of an eye.

It is a pity such an impressive program should be marred by a poor manual. It would have benefitted from the inclusion of a working example for the purchaser to follow, and a better cross-referencing system between manual and the options appearing on screen at various stages.

The style is also a little odd, with phrases such as "The Spectrum must be in a condition as switched on".

Allsort is obviously aimed at the fairly experienced programmer, and despite the manual represents an almost essential addition to the toolkit if work is to be done on business applications.

Alan Firminger, Allsorts' producer, offers useful back-up in the way of a query answering service and a discount offer on future Allsorts developments. A commercial licence to sell Allsorts generated code produced by users is currently priced at £10 per annum.

As a bonus, purchasers of Allsorts receive on the tape a program "LI-PRX" which enables list processing of arrays in Basic.

All in all a very highly recommended piece of software.

D.J.