🚀 go-pugleaf

>it is my opinion that there is no way to make a simple character code that
>will perform sorting and character conversion automatically.

Having done my share of i18n, I thoroughly agree.  When I was writing the
international scaffolding for Javelin, a PC time-series modelling package,
we came up with a locale-like thing that let you load a country
configuration file.  The config file set the collating sequence, including
which characters sort together, and whether there are pairs of characters
that sort as one like spanish ch and ll, or single characters that sort as
two, like the German umlauted vowels.  It also loaded the strings that
were inserted automatically into graphs and printouts, e.g. month names
and words like "Millions."

What did not change was the message strings in the program or the table of
function and macro names, all of which were version-specific.  That is, if
you bought a French version of Javelin, it always spoke French, but you
could load in a country driver to produce reports in German or Spanish or
Dutch.  The separation between the "locale" for the program and the
"locale" for the reports was quite useful, and the users liked it.  The
program message strings were linked in when a particular version of
Javelin was built, so that the distributor for a particular country could
build the version for that country.

Specifically referring to sorting, it became quite clear that we could not
depend on there being a canonical printable version of a sortable string.
In some languages, there are lower case characters without upper case
equivalents or vice versa.  The canonical form was a list of collating
sequence positions so that in English all versions of the letter "A" might
turn into 12, all versions of "B" into 13, and so on.  The canonical form
was easy to sort and useful for determining whether two strings were
equivalent, important in the symbol table, but you couldn't turn it back
into something printable.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl