Sorting

Sorting is any process of arranging items systematically, and has two common, yet distinct meanings:

In computer science, arranging in an ordered sequence is called "sorting". Sorting is a common operation in many applications, and efficient algorithms to perform it have been developed.

The most common uses of sorted sequences are:

The opposite of sorting, rearranging a sequence of items in a random or meaningless order, is called shuffling.

For sorting, either a weak order, "should not come after", can be specified, or a strict weak order, "should come before" (specifying one defines also the other, the two are the complement of the inverse of each other, see operations on binary relations). For the sorting to be unique, these two are restricted to a total order and a strict total order, respectively.

Sorting n-tuples (depending on context also called e.g. records consisting of fields) can be done based on one or more of its components. More generally objects can be sorted based on a property. Such a component or property is called a sort key.

For example, the items are books, the sort key is the title, subject or author, and the order is alphabetical.

A new sort key can be created from two or more sort keys by lexicographical order. The first is then called the primary sort key, the second the secondary sort key, etc.

For example, addresses could be sorted using the city as primary sort key, and the street as secondary sort key.

If the sort key values are totally ordered, the sort key defines a weak order of the items: items with the same sort key are equivalent with respect to sorting. See also stable sorting. If different items have different sort key values then this defines a unique order of the items.

A standard order is often called ascending (corresponding to the fact that the standard order of numbers is ascending, i.e. A to Z, 0 to 9), the reverse order descending (Z to A, 9 to 0). For dates and times, ascending means that earlier values precede later ones e.g. 1/1/2000 will sort ahead of 1/1/2001.

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