🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ihe8gEINNh5q@uni-erlangen.de> of comp.std.internat,
  mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de writes:
> maf@dtek.chalmers.se (Martin Forssen) writes:
> 
> > I'm afraid a lot of Swedes will refuse to accept any sorting order which
> > places aring and adiaeresis adjacent to a. In swedish these are completely
> > different characters and aring and adiaeresis comes after z. All of this
> > IMHO of course.
> 
> Isn't the Swedish convention to sort a-ring after z just as arbitrarily
> as the confusing old convention to sort a-diaresis in Germany as ae?
>

It might be to you, but to a Swede this is alphabetical order.  If you
want to sort A and A-ring together, you might also sort P and R
together based on their visual similarity, also E-F, O-Q, C-G, U-V-W
(V and W are sometimes sorted together in Swedish, although that
practice is becoming less common.  But they still teach in first grade
that the alphabet has 28 letters: A-Z, Aring, Adiaresis, Odiaresis,
excluding W.)

Many Swedes I know that regularly work on US-ASCII terminals prefer
using brackets and braces for the letters after Z, rather than typing
either a-a-o or aa-ae-oe.  At least the brackets are distinct, and
cannot be read as anything else.
 
> There are at least a few real world applications (I don't talk about
> trivialities like UNIX ls), e.g. catalogs of international libraries,
> where an _easy_ to understand language independend sorting standard would
> be extremely useful. Why not standardize one for Unicode in an easy
> _implementable_ way? Then let's see, how many people will adopt it and
> will quickly forget their traditional rules. Perhaps even many users
> in Sweden. There are perhaps already some multilingual sorting rules
> common practice, but I know no one that defines an easy implementable
> deterministic and total ordering for ISO 10646 strings.

For this application, I think English sorting order is rather well
established.  That doesn't mean language-adapted sorting conventions
will disappear, especially in countries like Sweden, Norway and Spain
where characters with diacritical combinations are considered distinct
and inseparable from their "base letters".

	/hpa
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