Stability in Sorting

A Simple Exploration of Sorting and Stability

Sorting is something we all do, whether it's organising books on a shelf or arranging apps on our phone. In computer science, sorting is a fundamental concept, where we arrange data in a specific order. But there's a special feature in sorting called stability that can be crucial for many applications, and it's worth understanding in simple terms.

What is Stability in Sorting?

Imagine you have a deck of cards where each card has a number and a suit. If you sort these cards by number and then by suit, you’d expect cards with the same number to stick together in the order you originally had them, right? That's what stability in sorting ensures: objects with equal keys (like our cards with the same number) appear in the same order in the sorted output as they appeared in the input.

Why Does Stability Matter?

Let’s take an example involving a list of students, where each student is described by the…