Sorting a Data Set with multiple 'Tie Breaks'

Question

I'm currently working on a software project in Swift that requires several different types of sorting mechanisms. I have been searching, to no avail, to find an algorithm to do a sort with tie-breaking. In other words, say you have a data set that could be represented like so:

[Name Of Data]:[Someone's ID]-[Same Someone's Score],[Someone's ID]-[Same Someone's Score],[etc...]\n
[Name Of Data]:[Someone's ID]-[Same Someone's Score],[Someone's ID]-[Same Someone's Score],[etc...]\n
[etc...]

One line, then, may look like this:

Wins:7-1,8-1,9-1,2-1,10-1,3-0,4-0,5-0,1-0,6-0

And another looks like this:

SpeakerPoints:6-26,2-20,4-19,7-17,8-16,9-16,5-16,1-12,3-11,10-8

I would like to be able to sort the IDs in terms of 'winner', where the 'Wins' criteria is 1st priority, and if there is a tie, the program would move to the 'SpeakerPoints' criteria, and so on...

Ordinarily I would use a platform specific mechanism (like LINQ for Windows or NSSortDescriptor for MacOS). However, the project is "Shared Code" that should compile on any platform necessary. If it matters, I'm using Silver, an implementation of Apple's Swift that compiles for Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android/etc... targets, so I am basically limited to using "pure swift" (Pure swift code works perfectly well). How might I implement a Sort to do this? I don't care about the algorithm being super efficient (though I don't want a simple sort to take hours either, I could do that myself :P), a modified bubble sort would be fine as long as it returned the correctly sorted ID's.

As a complication, the number of criteria is also a variable: this time it may be wins and speakerPoints, but next time may include opponentWins

Answer 1

When implementing a sort algorithm you need only create a function which returns greater, equal or less than when given two inputs. You dont need to worry about the absolute value of wins + speaker points + whatever.

So use or create an arbitrary sort algorithm (for example, a bubble sort) which just uses an injected:

IComparer
{
    Int Compare(x, y); // return 1,0,-1
}

Then you can write a concrete implementation with the required, compare wins, compare speaker points etc.

You can imagine more genric solutions where you inject an array of IComparers. But might be best to keep it simple to begin with.