Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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:
[1] Burstsort algorithms use a trie to store prefixes of strings, with growable arrays of pointers as end nodes containing sorted, unique, suffixes (referred to as buckets). Some variants copy the string tails into the buckets. As the buckets grow beyond a predetermined threshold, the buckets are "burst" into tries, giving the sort its name.
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.
Property list files use the filename extension.plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files. Property list files are often used to store a user's settings. They are also used to store information about bundles and applications , a task served by the resource fork in the old Mac OS.
Multi-key quicksort, also known as three-way radix quicksort, [1] is an algorithm for sorting strings.This hybrid of quicksort and radix sort was originally suggested by P. Shackleton, as reported in one of C.A.R. Hoare's seminal papers on quicksort; [2]: 14 its modern incarnation was developed by Jon Bentley and Robert Sedgewick in the mid-1990s. [3]
Sorting decimals properly is a bit more difficult, because different locales use different symbols for a decimal point, and sometimes the same character used as a decimal point is also used as a separator, for example "Section 3.2.5". There is no universal answer for how to sort such strings; any rules are application dependent.
Numeric literals in Python are of the normal sort, e.g. 0, -1, 3.4, 3.5e-8. Python has arbitrary-length integers and automatically increases their storage size as necessary. Prior to Python 3, there were two kinds of integral numbers: traditional fixed size integers and "long" integers of arbitrary size.