From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2003 - 01:33:28 EST
Dominikus Scherkl <Dominikus dot Scherkl at glueckkanja dot com> wrote:
>> It is not deterministic string ordering
> ?!?
> What's non-deterministic in numeric ordering?
> Ok, mix of (letter-)strings and numbers maybe not so
> straight-forward to sort than simply sorting digits
> by their encoding-value (this is the cause it was
> not implemented before), but I prefer it always very much.
The question really isn't whether one sort order is "better" than
another. It's easy to come up with examples where each method has an
advantage.
The real question is whether the same sort option should generate
different results on different versions of Windows, all other things
being equal. It would be nice to have an explicit option to sort
strings by numeric value instead of character-set collating order, but
not so good if the developer has no control over which method is used,
and worse if Microsoft did not publicize this change; I don't know if
they did or not).
Note that I'm speaking in terms of programmable sorting. I really don't
care how filenames in Windows Explorer are sorted.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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