Sorts the specified array of objects into ascending order, according to the
natural ordering of its elements. All elements in the array must implement the
Comparable interface. Furthermore, all elements in the array must be
mutually comparable (that is,
e1.compareTo(e2) must not throw a
ClassCastException for any elements
e1 and
e2 in the array).
This sort is guaranteed to be stable: equal elements will not be reordered as a result of the sort.
Implementation note: This implementation is a stable, adaptive, iterative mergesort that requires far fewer than n lg(n) comparisons when the input array is partially sorted, while offering the performance of a traditional mergesort when the input array is randomly ordered. If the input array is nearly sorted, the implementation requires approximately n comparisons. Temporary storage requirements vary from a small constant for nearly sorted input arrays to n/2 object references for randomly ordered input arrays.
The implementation takes equal advantage of ascending and descending order in its input array, and can take advantage of ascending and descending order in different parts of the the same input array. It is well-suited to merging two or more sorted arrays: simply concatenate the arrays and sort the resulting array.
The implementation was adapted from Tim Peters's list sort for Python (TimSort). It uses techiques from Peter McIlroy's "Optimistic Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity", in Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp 467-474, January 1993.