"Counting" rows

[Daniel Guerrero]

Hi fellows, I have this problem, I need to sort a table for some fields, but I need to "count" rows; I mean, I have this data:
first | second | third
aleph | beta | theta
or | and | xor

when I sort by first column I want to have this:
1 | aleph | beta | theta
2 | first | second | third
3 | or | and | xor

when I sort by second column I want:
1 | or | and | xor
2 | aleph | beta | theta
3 | first | second | third

and so on; as you see the first column is created dynamic and shows the order of the sort, not other field; and if this could also decrement in DESC sort mode, it would be terrific.

This is not hard to do out of this in any programming language, but I want to see if there is a way to do it in SQL not in a programming language.

Thanks in advance