A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 3, 2016 15:56 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by nybble41
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

But "the uppercase letters from A to Z" is locale-dependent. For a Pole, that includes Ó. For a Swede, it does not.

Basically, the moment you go beyond the user specifying all characters that they're interested in, you're making locale assumptions; whether that be because you're guessing at case, or because you're looking at a range and the user expects the range to include the characters they would include in that range.

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A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 4, 2016 0:09 UTC (Fri) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link] (2 responses)

There's always Unicode code point order, where A-Z is well-defined without respect to locale. UTF-8 has the nice property to sort that way using a simple strcmp-based comparator.

Sure, it isn't the order you'd see in a good old telephone book, but at least it's simple and predictable.

A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 4, 2016 9:55 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

That's the problem, though - there are several non-ambiguous but arbitrary orderings (Polish alphabet, Swedish alphabet, English alphabet, French alphabet, Unicode code point etc). The machine can't (definitionally, as they conflict) give you all reasonable orderings at once; historically (1970s and 1980s) we handled this by saying that the ordering used in English is the One True Ordering, and anyone who thinks in another language can learn the One True Language. Modern machines can do better (and should, IMO).

A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 5, 2016 1:19 UTC (Sat) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link]

> Modern machines can do better (and should, IMO).

I'm not convinced. Software is buggy and crappy enough already even without supporting a thousand different ways to sort a directory listing. The machines can do better, but programmers apparently can't.