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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!boring!guido
From: guido@boring.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.internat,net.misc
Subject: Re: Character sets, sorting etc.
Message-ID: <6672@boring.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1-Nov-85 14:18:56 EST
Article-I.D.: boring.6672
Posted: Fri Nov  1 14:18:56 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 12:35:26 EST
References: <150@oberon.UUCP>
Reply-To: guido@mcvax.UUCP (Guido van Rossum)
Organization: "Stamp Out BASIC" Committee, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 27
Xref: linus net.internat:76 net.misc:7456
Summary: sorting should be done with table lookup anyway
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax.LOCAL

In article <150@oberon.UUCP> blarson@oberon.UUCP (Bob Larson) writes:
>The sorting order
>problem is really one of replacing a case translator with a table lookup.
>Hopefully the table could be make easy to change for working in different
>languages.

YES!  Decent sourting should always be done be table lookup.  As an
example, the Macintosh international utilities package sorts strings
in this way, and the table can be customized to cope with national
variations in the desired dictionary order.  The Mac still uses the
character set's native ordering to determine an ordering for strings
that compare equal using the table (e.g., AA equals aa but precedes
it, while aa precedes AB), so the character set's ordering still
matters.

I don't know whether the Macintosh character set (which is a superset
of ASCII and contains most accented or otherwise slightly modified
characters found in various Western European languages, but does not
support differenty alphabets) would be acceptable as a standard,
but at least it addresses the problems that are encountered most
frequently, it fits in 8 bits and is compatible with ASCII.

(I'm afraid that there is another standard extension of ASCII which
uses up the 8th bit for lots of control codes like cursor up.
However this does not seem to have caught on very much.)

	Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam (guido@mcvax.UUCP)