A Sort Optimization Technique: decorate-sort-dedecorate

[Tom Cole]

Well you cross-posted this enough, including a Java group, and didn't
even ask about us... What a pity.

In Java, classes can implement the Comparable interface. This interface
contains only one method, a compareTo(Object o) method, and it is
defined to return a value < 0 if the Object is considered less than the
one being passed as an argument, it returns a value > 0 if considered
greater than, and 0 if they are considered equal.

The object implementing this interface can use any of the variables
available to it (AKA address, zip code, longitude, latitude, first
name, whatever) to return this -1, 0 or 1. This is slightly different
than what you mention as we don't have to "decorate" the object. These
are all variables that already exist in the Object, and if fact make it
what it is. So, of course, there is no need to un-decorate at the end.

There are several built-in objects and methods available to sort
Objects that are Comparable, even full Arrays of them.