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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.
For example, say that student records consisting of name and class section are sorted dynamically, first by name, then by class section. If a stable sorting algorithm is used in both cases, the sort-by-class-section operation will not change the name order; with an unstable sort, it could be that sorting by section shuffles the name order ...
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.
This is done by merging runs until certain criteria are fulfilled. Timsort has been Python's standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3 (since version 3.11 using the Powersort merge policy [5]), and is used to sort arrays of non-primitive type in Java SE 7, [6] on the Android platform, [7] in GNU Octave, [8] on V8, [9] and Swift. [10]
A list containing a single element is, by definition, sorted. Repeatedly merge sublists to create a new sorted sublist until the single list contains all elements. The single list is the sorted list. The merge algorithm is used repeatedly in the merge sort algorithm. An example merge sort is given in the illustration.
The shuffle sort [6] is a variant of bucket sort that begins by removing the first 1/8 of the n items to be sorted, sorts them recursively, and puts them in an array. This creates n/8 "buckets" to which the remaining 7/8 of the items are distributed. Each "bucket" is then sorted, and the "buckets" are concatenated into a sorted array.
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:
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.