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From: walters@io.UUCP (Tim Walters)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: International Collating Sequence
Message-ID: <398@io.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 23:31:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: io.398
Posted: Sun Oct  4 23:31:12 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Oct-87 01:26:23 EDT
References: <2706@sol.ARPA> <379119b2.b88e@apollo.uucp> <2752@sol.ARPA> <393@io.UUCP> <1297@haddock.ISC.COM>
Reply-To: walters@wally.UUCP (Tim Walters)
Organization: Interleaf, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 44

In article <1297@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>In article <393@io.UUCP> walters@wally.UUCP (Tim Walters) writes:
>>I'm afraid I can't see the advantage of a sorting sequence that's easy
>>and efficient but doesn't sort letters the way you want.  I would never
>>use a routine which put, say, 'w' after 'z'...
>
>Funny, I use one all the time (ASCII strcmp) that sorts 'a' after 'Z', even
>though that's not the standard way to sort things in my native language
>(American English).

Well, I use strcmp quite a bit myself, mostly because it's there and
easy to use. It does put 'a' after 'Z', but this usually isn't too
much of a problem since most of my text is all caps, initial caps, or
all lower case. That just means (at most) three ranges of text to look
at, with everything ordered nicely within those ranges. Even so, I
think in most cases I would prefer to call, say, 'nstrcmp' which
sorted sorted things according to a (user configurable) standard
dictionary ordering.

>>National sequences ... are THE way dictionaries, phone books, book indexes,
>>and everything else are sorted in a particular country.
>
>Even within a country, it's not completely consistent.  German \(o" collates
>as `o' in the dictionary, but `oe' in the phone book.  I believe it has been
>stated in this newsgroup that Dutch \(ij can sort as `ij', `y', or a letter
>between `x' and `y'.

You're right, it was a little too broad to say that there was only one
standard per country. I had forgotten about the different sorting
standards in Germany. I hadn't heard about the alternate sortings of
the Dutch ij.  There are probably other countries which have more than
one way of sorting in certain contexts. I would argue, however, that
this does not mean that people can easily, or happily, adapt to a new
sorting standard; rather, I think it means that end users would like
to select the sorting sequence themselves.

There is a similar diversity in the national preferences for formats
of dates. A single standard output format for dates might be
acceptable in a few cases, but most people will prefer to see them
written the way they're used to seeing them.
-- 
	...!harvard!umb!ileaf!walters	Tim Walters, Interleaf
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