> (for consistent choice of base for log) It's not clear the choice of log should be consistent. For radix sort the number of iterations is the log of the max

> (for consistent choice of base for log) It's not clear the choice of log should be consistent. For radix sort the number of iterations is the log of the max element in the base of the number of buckets. For a merge sort the number of comparisons is pretty close to log-base-two of the number of elements to sort. (Not exactly -- to merge n items you need n-1 comparisons, not n.) Of course, asymptotically they're the same -- lg(n) == log(n) etc -- and we're counting comparisons on one two-fingered hand and divs+mods on the other, so non-asymptotic comparisons don't make much sense without also talking about benchmarks.