🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan2.230101.20871@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
 > The problem with your idea is that you believe that everything is
 > known at input time. It isn't. If you have a list of names which 
 > is to be used in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, the list will
 > sort differently depending on the reader, not on who is entering the 
 > text. The Swedish and Finnish alphabets ends with A-ring, A-dots,
 > O-dots. The Danish and Norwegian ends with AE-ligature, O-slash,
 > A-ring. Looks trivial for a simple bit-order sort? Nope. Because
 > the dotted A is equivlent to the AE ligature and so is dotted O and
 > O-slash. Thus Danish and Norwegian names with slashed O should
 > appear together with Swedish and Finnish names with dotted O. So
 > the sort algorithm must make no distinction between the two, except
 > when everything else in the same. And the sort algorithm must know
 > in which order the user wants the text to be presented.
Not to mention that the Danish/Norwegian 'aa' is sometimes equivalent
to 'a-ring'.
 > 
 > This is a simple end-user requirement which your proposal is not
 > incapabale to handle.
I think you intended to say that Vadims proposal is not capable to
handle it (I agree with that).
 > 
 > >which is not easy and sometimes ruins the whole logic of the
 > >program (see shell globbing example in my previous posting os
 > >tr example before).
 > 
 > You've talked a lot about regular expressions etc. Frankly I
 > don't give a damn about those. The main bulk of computer users
 > are not programmers and don't know what a regular expression
 > is, so why focus such specific issues?

I agree completely here.  Shell globbing, regular expressions and
sorting by 'ls' are not relevant.  (There are still systems around
that do not sort the list of files at all.  Can you say IBM VM/CS?)
Those things are indeed used by programmers only, end-users search
on fixed strings and would be surprised if their dotted-a shows no
match because of language differences.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl