Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site boring.UUCP 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)