Sort Commentary

General:. Glee has provisions for sorting each of its objects. The rules are object specific. This section works across many Glee objects and discusses their behavior to sorting and grading operators.





GLEE Character sort ( >>>): The Glee collating sequence attempts to deliver the most generally desired sorting result in the most direct fashion possible. The Glee collating sequence treats all variations of like characters as if they were the same character. For example, it treats "AaÀÁÂÃÄÅàáâãäå" all as just "A". Glee also treats most non-alphanumeric characters as simple white space. Further, it removes all "extraneous" whitespace when comparing. Finally, it ignores the "-" and " ` " characters so words with or without these characters compare equally. By default, sorts are Glee sorts. One may explicitly specify the Glee sort with the operator combination @= >>>




Exact Character sort (@== >>>) : The Exact collating sequence assigns a collating order to each character in the ascii sequence. However, the sequence differs from the ascii sequence and delivers a more usable result than a sort based strictly on the ascii character order. For example, the "A"'s are grouped to sort as "aAàÀáÁâÂãÃäÄåÅ". One can obtain a pure ascii sort by overriding the Exact collating sequence with 0..255 =>#CSEXACT.




ASCII Character sort: (0..255 => #CSEXACT; @== >>>). To obtain a customary (the way virtually all other languages do it) ASCII sort, you can override the collating sequence for the Exact character sort. To return to the default exact sorting sequence use '' => #CSEXACT.




Numeric grade; indexing; and sorting: Sorting is indexing by a grade vector. Glee produces a grade up vector with (``> ... read as indices of up)and a grade down with (``<... indices of down). This result when used as an index into the original object results in a sort. Glee also supports sorting directly with ( >>> ... depicts up) and ( <<< ... depicts down) operators.




Grading and sorting a string: This illustrates using the grade operator (``>) to obtain indices for sorting. Also notice when an exact sort (@==) is done, the collating sequence is different. This is because Glee sorts treat upper and lower case characters the same. Since Glee is a stable sort, like elements retain their relative postions. Sorting can be done directly using the sort operator (>>>)




Sorting sequence of strings:. Strings are sorted as if they were words. The longer words sort higher than shorter words. Of course you can use grade and indexing as well.




Hetrogeneous sorting: Glee will sort anything with anything else. In the case of hetrogeneous sequences, dissimilar types are ordered according to their ?typen property value.




:




: