🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1iscn0EINNhjt@uni-erlangen.de> mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de writes:
 > What the hell is this "English sorting order"?
Agreed.

 >                           Perhaps we are speaking
 > about the same idea, an international DEFAULT sorting order, that will be
 > acceptable in many countries.
Might be useful, but what you forget is that sorting is for the users, not
for the programmers (the programmers can sort any way they seem fit, as
long as the user understands it).  What about the user who normally does
not distinguish V and W (as in many scandinavian countries)?  What language
users would accept a sorting where diacritics are ignored and sorting is
done with 26 letters (plus additions for Icelandic Edh and Thorn).  Moreover,
where would you classify the 5 Nama (Hottentot) clicks, represented by: /,
/= (overprint these two), //, ! and #?  I know Unicode has LATIN LETTER
EXCLAMATION POINT for one of these, I do not have the Unicode Standard
(as it was sold out when I tried to buy it), but I would not be surprised
if there are further LATIN LETTER code points for the additional clicks.

 > There won't even be collisions if you add France and Germany.
Perhaps no, but add Spanish and you get problems.

 > But I don't know that any has been defined yet. If people in Sweden need
 > a different order, than they should get their order, no problem.
Ok, where do I sort "!homi" and "//natib"?

 > But it would be a good idea to define a default order that might be 
 > easily refered to (e.g. as an ISO standard) and that satisfies the
 > needs of the greatest set of countries for which this is possible with
 > one sorting order.
This would be ridiculous if the number of users from those countries are
only a minority.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl