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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: International Collating Sequence
Message-ID: <29931@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 3-Oct-87 23:24:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.29931
Posted: Sat Oct  3 23:24:48 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Oct-87 04:01:19 EDT
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> In a bibliographic journal one is forced to list the authors
> or names of journals in some order, mixing names from many different
> languages and using many different types of diacritical marks.
> Thus, one has to define some "international collating sequence"
> in such a situation. Does G\*:odel come before or after Godsil?

Yes, but would you want your phone books sorted using this sequence?  Unless
you can eliminate *all* uses of national collating sequences when used by
computers, an international collating sequence would only be able to
*supplement*, not *replace*, national collating sequences.  As such, you'd
still have to have code to handle the national collating sequences; the
international collating sequence would be yet another variant, along with all
the national collating sequences.  The bulk of the collating sequence problem
would be unaffected by this international collating sequence.

Also, if the primary intent of this sequence is to support bibliographies
with authors and titles in multiple languages, it's not clear that overloading
e.g. the glyph "H" with the meanings "aitch" in the Roman alphabet, "eta" in
the Greek alphabet, and "en" in the Cyrillic alphabet would be necessary; would
not such databases be, at least in countries using the Roman alphabet,
Romanized?  I don't know whether bibliographies in Greek or in languages using
the Cyrillic alphabet Hellenize or Cyrilify (?) foreign names.  Given that,
would you need a single international character set and accompanying collating
sequence?

(For that matter, would the same bibliographical journal be sorted the same way
when prepared in several different languages, or would the native collating
sequence be used?  Would the same bibliographical journal even *look* the same
when prepared in different languages?  "Moskva" is turned into "Moscow" in
English, but is it turned into "Moscow" in other languages as well"?)
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com