🚀 go-pugleaf

bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org (Christoph Badura) writes:

>>I do not think you understand.  From the AVON (Amtliches Verzeichnis der
>>Ortnetzkennzahlen) edition 1985, which gives area codes for the places in
>>Germany.  The next is a selection of places mentioned ("o is o-umlaut):
>>	Modautal
>>	M"ockm"uhl
>>	...
>>now come up with a coding that allows this (standard German) sorting.

>This is _not_ standard German sorting, it's standard German PTT
>sorting (and quite confusing at times).

Well, this is the "Deutsches Einheits ABC" (translate this with German
Standard Sorting) defined in DIN 5007 which clearly defines that
a-Umlaut is sorted as ae. I don't like this rule very much, but at the
moment, it is the most official standard (DIN is our ISO member body)
we have.

>The Duden treats umlauts as the corresponding vowel with respect to
>sorting order (i.e. "o sorts the same as o etc.)

And many other dictionaries ignore DIN 5007 as well, because sorting
a-Umlaut ("a) as 'a' instead of 'ae' makes searching for humans
much more easier.

All this only supports my conclusion again:

We have to define international multilingual sorting rules for Unicode
strings that depend NOT on the language and that do NOT try to be
compatible with every existing sorting system, because nearly no
country seems to have well established sorting rules. This seems to
be the only practical approach in my eyes. I see no disadvantages.

Believe me, German users who know what they are talking about won't
complan if "a, "o and "u are not sorted as ae, oe and ue. Sorting all
latin characters directly behind their version without a diacritic
will be accepted by 99.9% of people using latin alphabets, because
this rule is easy to learn, easy to understand and language
independend. Then let's insert the cyrillic letters (like in KOI-8?)
and the greek letters (delta sorts near D etc.) in this alphabeth
and we get a beautiful multilingual sorting! Let's start to work on
ISO sorting rules.

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE ONCE YOU ACCEPTED THAT INCOMPATIBILITY WITH
EXISTING HISTORICAL RULES IS NECESSARY!

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
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