Well, you could've formatted columns together to form keys with a natural lexicographic comparison, but that's horrible.
I made a tweak to the behavior of "orderby" which borrows from how the "grade" operators work in K: lists are now given a lexicographic comparison, so tupling will now work. The "join" operator will zip together columns for this purpose. As a contrived example:
e:insert c:""split"ABBBABABABABAAABA" n:(7,7,2,4,4,0,3,4,2,0,9,7,4,6,8,2,3) into 0 select c n orderby (c join n) asc from e +-----+---+ | c | n | +-----+---+ | "A" | 2 | | "A" | 3 | | "A" | 3 | | "A" | 4 | | "A" | 4 | | "A" | 6 | | "A" | 7 | | "A" | 8 | | "A" | 9 | | "B" | 0 | | "B" | 0 | | "B" | 2 | | "B" | 2 | | "B" | 4 | | "B" | 4 | | "B" | 7 | | "B" | 7 | +-----+---+