Sorts the specified range of the specified array of objects into ascending order, according to the natural ordering of its elements. The range to be sorted extends from index fromIndex, inclusive, to index toIndex, exclusive. (If fromIndex==toIndex, the range to be sorted is empty.) All elements in this range must implement the Comparable interface. Furthermore, all elements in this range 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.

Parameters:

a		the array to be sorted
fromIndex		the index of the first element (inclusive) to be sorted
toIndex		the index of the last element (exclusive) to be sorted

Exceptions:

IllegalArgumentException		if fromIndex > toIndex or (optional) if the natural ordering of the array elements is found to violate the Comparable contract
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException		if fromIndex < 0 or toIndex > a.length
ClassCastException		if the array contains elements that are not mutually comparable (for example, strings and integers).