Sorting

Sorting is the process of taking a set of data and creating an ordering based on some criteria. The criteria must allow for items to be compared and used to determine what should come first and second. For example you can sort numbers. But even then, there is an ascending order (smaller numbers come before the bigger ones) or a descending order (bigger numbers come before the smaller ones). For other data, you can still have this kind of ordering. For example for strings, you can have alphabetic ordering ("apple" comes before "banana"). Anything that allows you to compare and say item A comes before item B allows for sorting.

Regardless of what it is that we are basing the sorting on, the algorithms used for sorting are the same. The only difference is the comparison operation. With the comparison all we are doing is asking which item should come first.

In this section of the notes we will cover 5 sorting algorithms.