Noun | 1. | sort - a category of things distinguished by some common characteristic or quality; "sculpture is a form of art"; "what kinds of desserts are there?" |
2. | sort - an approximate definition or example; "she wore a sort of magenta dress"; "she served a creamy sort of dessert thing" | |
3. | sort - a person of a particular character or nature; "what sort of person is he?"; "he's a good sort" | |
4. | sort - an operation that segregates items into groups according to a specified criterion; "the bottleneck in mail delivery it the process of sorting" Synonyms: sorting | |
Verb | 1. | sort - examine in order to test suitability; "screen these samples"; "screen the job applicants" |
2. | sort - arrange or order by classes or categories; "How would you classify these pottery shards--are they prehistoric?" |
1. | (application, algorithm) | sort - To arrange a collection of items
in some specified order. The items - records in a file or
data structures in memory - consist of one or more fields or
members. One of these fields is designated as the "sort key"
which means the records will be ordered according to the value
of that field. Sometimes a sequence of key fields is
specified such that if all earlier keys are equal then the
later keys will be compared. Within each field some ordering
is imposed, e.g. ascending or descending numerical, lexical ordering, or date. Sorting is the subject of a great deal of study since it is a common operation which can consume a lot of computer time. There are many well-known sorting algorithms with different time and space behaviour and programming complexity. Examples are quicksort, insertion sort, bubble sort, heap sort, and tree sort. These employ many different data structures to store sorted data, such as arrays, linked lists, and binary trees. | |
2. | (tool) | sort - The Unix utility program for sorting lines of
files. Unix manual page: sort(1). |