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In computing, natural sort order (or natural sorting) is the ordering of strings in alphabetical order, except that multi-digit numbers are treated atomically, i.e., as if they were a single character. Natural sort order has been promoted as being more human-friendly ("natural") than machine-oriented, pure alphabetical sort order.
Merge sort. In computer science, a sorting algorithm is an algorithm that puts elements of a list into an order.The most frequently used orders are numerical order and lexicographical order, and either ascending or descending.
Most languages provide a generic sort function that implements a sort algorithm that will sort arbitrary objects. This function usually accepts an arbitrary function that determines how to compare whether two elements are equal or if one is greater or less than the other. Consider this Python code sorting a list of strings by length of the string:
Timsort is a hybrid, stable sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data. It was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language. The algorithm finds subsequences of the data that are already ordered (runs) and uses them to sort the ...
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.
Hence, this representation is commonly referred to as a C string. This representation of an n-character string takes n + 1 space (1 for the terminator), and is thus an implicit data structure. In terminated strings, the terminating code is not an allowable character in any string.
Problems of sufficient simplicity are solved directly. For example, to sort a given list of n natural numbers, split it into two lists of about n/2 numbers each, sort each of them in turn, and interleave both results appropriately to obtain the sorted version of the given list (see the picture). This approach is known as the merge sort algorithm.
Bubble sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the input list element by element, comparing the current element with the one after it, swapping their values if needed. These passes through the list are repeated until no swaps have to be performed during a pass, meaning that the ...