Floats doesn't complicate radix sort that much. To quote McIlroy et al. (1993) "the troubles with radix sort are in implementation, not in conception". Finding

Floats doesn't complicate radix sort that much. To quote McIlroy et al. (1993) "the troubles with radix sort are in implementation, not in conception". Finding the median strikes me as more of a academic problem than a real life problem. However, partial sort (for which finding the median is a sub problem) is an easy optimization relevant for search engines, where you sometimes only need to extract the hits from position 1000-2000.