| You can easily implement this with a finite number of sorting
| markers if you allow arbitrary length strings of sorting markers.
| Think about how UTF-8 works again, and then you will see the light.
I had considered that, but I didn't like it much. You might just
as well have just 1 marker, and precede an integer with N digits with
N copies of the sorting marker. It could be worse, and nothing else
springs to mind.
In fact, that has the virtue that it also serves a purpose as
markup (allowing swift lexical analysis): if you do it like that, you
can tell if a comma (say) is part of a number, or a separator. If #
is the sorting marker:
1,1,2,3,5,8 becomes #1,#1,#2,#3,#5,#8
but
3.1416 becomes ######3.1416
H'mm ... maybe it's not so bad after all ...
/|
o o o (_|/
/|
(_/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:59 EDT