> From: David Gallardo [mailto:dgallardo@mediaone.net]
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 10:07 AM
> As a practical matter, you need to take the diacritics into
> account when
> sorting, even in English where they (may or may not) have linguistic
> significance, otherwise you'll get nondeterministic
> behaviour. In other
> words, résumé and resume should fall together, but always in
> the same order.
Why? This may be of interest and benefit to programmers, but not
necessarily to end-users. The computer should serve the human, not the
other way around, and it is not particularly challenging to come up with
search and sort algorithms which understand the concept of terminal sets
which need to be iterated over to find the final entity as opposed to
terminal entities. Recall Mike Sykes' post concerning sort order:
<MikeS>
Reverting the question of order, the 'Guide to the New SOED' (a.k.a. Help)
reveals that:
<quote>
Entries are accessed in strict alphabetical order. ... ; a headword with an
accent or diacritic over a letter follows one consisting of the same
sequence of letters without. ...
The order of headwords which are spelled the same way but have different
parts of speech is as follows:
noun (abbreviated n.)
pronoun (abbreviated pron.)
adjective (abbreviated a.)
verb (abbreviated v.)
...
</quote>
</MikeS>
This explicit ordering will still be insufficient if we choose to
include verb tenses in our word list, whence we get the two "read"s. If
someone has a reason why these two words need to be in the same order in
everyone's word list, I'll listen...
/|/|ike
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