A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 4, 2016 0:09 UTC (Fri) by lsl (guest, #86508)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by farnz
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

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.

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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.