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qsort is a C standard library function that implements a sorting algorithm for arrays of arbitrary objects according to a user-provided comparison function. It is named after the "quicker sort" algorithm [1] (a quicksort variant due to R. S. Scowen), which was originally used to implement it in the Unix C library, although the C standard does not require it to implement quicksort.
In computer programming, a collection is an abstract data type that is a grouping of items that can be used in a polymorphic way. Often, the items are of the same data type such as int or string. Sometimes the items derive from a common type; even deriving from the most general type of a programming language such as object or variant.
Sorting a set of unlabelled weights by weight using only a balance scale requires a comparison sort algorithm. A comparison sort is a type of sorting algorithm that only reads the list elements through a single abstract comparison operation (often a "less than or equal to" operator or a three-way comparison) that determines which of two elements should occur first in the final sorted list.
In C, the functions strcmp and memcmp perform a three-way comparison between strings and memory buffers, respectively. They return a negative number when the first argument is lexicographically smaller than the second, zero when the arguments are equal, and a positive number otherwise.
Introsort or introspective sort is a hybrid sorting algorithm that provides both fast average performance and (asymptotically) optimal worst-case performance. It begins with quicksort, it switches to heapsort when the recursion depth exceeds a level based on (the logarithm of) the number of elements being sorted and it switches to insertion sort when the number of elements is below some threshold.
The following is a bitonic sorting network with 16 inputs: The 16 numbers enter as the inputs at the left end, slide along each of the 16 horizontal wires, and exit at the outputs at the right end. The network is designed to sort the elements, with the largest number at the bottom. The arrows are comparators.
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.
Strings are passed to functions by passing a pointer to the first code unit. Since char * and wchar_t * are different types, the functions that process wide strings are different than the ones processing normal strings and have different names. String literals ("text" in the C source code) are converted to arrays during compilation. [2]