Ooops, that was answering the question you actually asked. The one you meant to
ask is answered by this part:
The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating sequence of
the locale in use: see Comparison.
...and collating sequences is a weird and woolly subject, where you cannot even
be sure that locales of the same name on two different platforms sort strings
in the same order.
-pd
On 18 Mar 2016, at 10:13 , peter dalgaard <pda...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 Mar 2016, at 10:02 , Patrick Connolly <p_conno...@slingshot.co.nz>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't follow why this happens:
>>
>>> sort(c(LETTERS[1:5], letters[1:5]))
>> [1] "a" "A" "b" "B" "c" "C" "d" "D" "e" "E"
>>
>> The help for sort() says:
>>
>> method: character string specifying the algorithm used. Not
>> available for partial sorting. Can be abbreviated.
>>
>> But what are the methods available? The help mentions xtfrm but that
>> doesn't illuminate, I'd have thought that at least by default it would
>> have something to do with ASCII codes. But that's not the case since
>> all the uppercase ones would be before the lowercase ones.
>>
>> I know something different is happening but I don't know what it is
>> (do you, Mr Jones?). Apologies to Bob Dylan.
>>
>
>
> Um, read _all_ of the help file?
>
> sort.int(x, partial = NULL, na.last = NA, decreasing = FALSE,
> method = c("shell", "quick"), index.return = FALSE)
>
> [snip]
>
> Method "shell" uses Shellsort (an O(n^{4/3}) variant from Sedgewick (1986)).
> If x has names a stable modification is used, so ties are not reordered.
> (This only matters if names are present.)
>
> Method "quick" uses Singleton (1969)'s implementation of Hoare's Quicksort
> method and is only available when x is numeric (double or integer) and
> partial is NULL. (For other types of x Shellsort is used, silently.) It is
> normally somewhat faster than Shellsort (perhaps 50% faster on vectors of
> length a million and twice as fast at a billion) but has poor performance in
> the rare worst case. (Peto's modification using a pseudo-random midpoint is
> used to make the worst case rarer.) This is not a stable sort, and ties may
> be reordered.
>
> Factors with less than 100,000 levels are sorted by radix sorting when method
> is not supplied: see sort.list.
>
> -pd
>
>
> --
> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Office: A 4.23
> Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
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