Re: International Collating Sequence

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2 total messages Started by Bert Hutchings Wed, 14 Oct 1987 09:54

#900

Author: Bert Hutchings
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1987 09:54

18 lines
1283 bytes

Here's a Scottish contribution to this topic.  The British Post Office takes
an apparently cavalier, but entirely practical, approach to sorting Scottish
surnames beginning with 'Mac' in their telephone directories - every variant
spelling of this prefix is sorted as Mac, and the case of the next letter is
ignored,  but the name is printed as the subscriber prefers to use it.  Thus

	MacDonald
	McEnroe
	M`Farquhar
	Macgillicuddy
	Machine Tool Hire Ltd.
	Mcilwraith
	M`indoe

are in collated sequence. I think that special cases like this, and like the
common requirement  to elide 'a', 'the' etc,  support the negative view that
an underlying almost-ready-to-use character collation sequence is so small a
component of every desired end product that it isn't really worth the effort.

Re: International Collating Sequence

#901

Author: ERCF08 Bob Gray
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1987 15:26

29 lines
1680 bytes

In article <176@aiva.ed.ac.uk> bert@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Bert Hutchings) writes:
>surnames beginning with 'Mac' in their telephone directories - every variant
>spelling of this prefix is sorted as Mac, and the case of the next letter is
>ignored,  but the name is printed as the subscriber prefers to use it.  Thus
>
>	MacDonald
>	McEnroe
>	M`Farquhar
>	Macgillicuddy
>	Machine Tool Hire Ltd.
>	Mcilwraith
>	M`indoe

Just to confuse things further, some women whose family name
begins with the Mac (meaning son of) prefix, are insisting on
being known by the Nic (meaning daughter of) prefix.

yet more special cases to be taken care of.

> ... support the negative view that
>an underlying almost-ready-to-use character collation sequence is so small a
>component of every desired end product that it isn't really worth the effort.

Any collation sequence would also have to be easily
re-defined at a user level to indicate local changes in
sequence, or changes with time. Any product could have an
"international" sequence but the options should always be
there to easily override the default options.
	Bob.

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