HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Sorting and Arranging When you begin a sort, you must specify the keys, the place where records will be compared. Then, the keys of each record are compared and put into a hierarchichal arrangment. The resulting arrangement depends two things: the sequence and the order. You must specify both. The sequence determines what follows what: for example, 0,1,2,...,9 in digits. There are predefined sequences, like the standard alphanumeric ones, or you can create your own. Sequencing depends on the data type of the key. You pass the type in one field of the keys parameter. Number type keys are sorted in standard numeric order. ASCII or EBCDIC byte types (type 0 in the keys parameter) are sorted in their own sequences, shown in Appendix C. You can, however, vary the sequence of byte types if you wish. You may want an alphabetic sequence that is not case sensitive. For example, you may want "AaBbCc..." instead of the ASCII sequence of "ABC...abc". You may want your EBCDIC data sorted ignoring hyphens and punctuation, or with the digits before the letters. The order determines which end of the sequence will come first. There are two options: ascending or descending. For example, the digits in ascending order are: 0,1,2,...,9; the digits in descending order are: 9,8,7,...,0.
NOTE When performing Native Language (NL) functions, alphanumeric sorting and merging needs to be done using the specifics of the native language. See the end of this chapter for more information.