Sorting lists of lists by columns

[Alex Martelli]

sismex01 at hebmex.com wrote:
   ...
> significant, then you'd need to reorder your tuple elements,
> sort, and then reorder again.  This is known in Pythonspeak
> as a "decorate-sort-undecorate" manouver :-)

Incidentally, I was looking it up, to attribute it properly,
but with Google's advanced group search the earliest mentions
I can find are by me in May 2001, and I'm pretty sure I did
not invent the name.  Can anybody help me with URLs to earlier
usage of the term?  Thanks!


Alex