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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.
In mathematics and computer science, the sorting numbers are a sequence of numbers introduced in 1950 by Hugo Steinhaus for the analysis of comparison sort algorithms. These numbers give the worst-case number of comparisons used by both binary insertion sort and merge sort .
Sorting small arrays optimally (in the fewest comparisons and swaps) or fast (i.e. taking into account machine-specific details) is still an open research problem, with solutions only known for very small arrays (<20 elements). Similarly optimal (by various definitions) sorting on a parallel machine is an open research topic.
Even when using data-sort-type=number in the column header, text in front of a number in any cell breaks numerical sorting of that cell. Text after a number is not a problem if the sort order of a column is specified by using data-sort-type=number. Leading zeroes are not necessary for numerical sorting of a column.
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.
The number of swaps can be reduced by calculating the position of multiple elements before moving them. For example, if the target position of two elements is calculated before they are moved into the proper position, the number of swaps can be reduced by about 25% for random data. In the extreme case, this variant works similar to merge sort.
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In computer science, radix sort is a non-comparative sorting algorithm.It avoids comparison by creating and distributing elements into buckets according to their radix.For elements with more than one significant digit, this bucketing process is repeated for each digit, while preserving the ordering of the prior step, until all digits have been considered.