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From: bert@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Bert Hutchings)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: International Collating Sequence
Message-ID: <176@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 04:54:04 EST
Article-I.D.: aiva.176
Posted: Wed Oct 14 04:54:04 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 22:04:56 EST
Organization: AI Applications Institute, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 18

Here's a Scottish contribution to this topic.  The British Post Office takes
an apparently cavalier, but entirely practical, approach to sorting Scottish
surnames beginning with 'Mac' in their telephone directories - every variant
spelling of this prefix is sorted as Mac, and the case of the next letter is
ignored,  but the name is printed as the subscriber prefers to use it.  Thus

	MacDonald
	McEnroe
	M`Farquhar
	Macgillicuddy
	Machine Tool Hire Ltd.
	Mcilwraith
	M`indoe

are in collated sequence. I think that special cases like this, and like the
common requirement  to elide 'a', 'the' etc,  support the negative view that
an underlying almost-ready-to-use character collation sequence is so small a
component of every desired end product that it isn't really worth the effort.