🚀 go-pugleaf

Let's talk for a minute or two about putting strings in alphabetical order.
Here, as I understand it, are some of the problems involved:

  -- Character set.  The codes used for characters not found in the English 
alphabet are not well standardized.  Some people reassign the "national 
option" characters which in the U.S.  are things like curly braces.  Some, 
like the IBM PC crowd, try to define an 8-bit character set.  Some, like 
the Teletex crowd, define multi-byte sequences for characters with 
accents.  I have no idea what happens to characters like the Icelandic eth 
and thorn which are not created by adding an accent to an English letter.  

  -- Upper vs.  lower case.  The mapping between upper and lower case is 
quite language specific.  Some languages are quite strict about mapping 
between corresponding accented upper and lower case, while others (French, 
notably) are pretty casual about their upper case accented letters.  I 
gather that there are languages with lower case letters that have no upper 
case equivalent.  

  -- Digraphs.  Many languages have character pairs which, for the purpose
of alphabetization, are treated as one letter, such as Spanish "ll".

  -- Alphabet order.  Some languages sort accented letters in next to their 
unaccented versions.  Others put them at the end of the alphabet or 
otherwise scramble them around.  

Anything else important I've left out?

John Levine, Javelin Software, Cambridge MA 617-494-1400
{ decvax!cca | think | ihnp4 | cbosgd }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.ARPA

The opinions above are solely those of a 12 year old hacker who has broken
into my account, and not those of my employer or any other organization.