Olivier Mascia wrote:

> Le 01-mars-05, à 19:49, Ann W. Harrison a écrit :
>>
>>First order: A is different than B
>>2nd order: A is different from A-accent-grave
>>3rd order: A is different than a
>>4th order: The type of punctuation mark is important.
>>
>>For instance:
>>Redwing
>>Red wing
>>Red-wing
>>Redwood
>>Red wood
>>Red worm
>
>
> Well... Now show that result to any french people using a computer for
> any other task than the very specific one of writing the next edition
> of the "Larousse" french dictionnary and they will cry at you : "what's
> this mess ! You're software is buggy".
>
> Most french people using computers will expect this to sort as:
>
>
>>Red wing
>>Red wood
>>Red worm
>>Red-wing
>>Redwing
>>Redwood
>
>
> To "justify" they are right and that your software is wrong those
> french people will throw the ASCII codes at you to show that space and
> hyphen comes before letters !! Isn't that stunning ?

Ah, but we go back to the Unicode standard and then back to the Academie
Francaise, and ask "Are you Frenchmen first, or geeks?" [N.B., first be
sure they're French and not Belgian, Swiss, or Canadian] Then ask them
how they feel about having 'a' follow 'Z'.

>
>
> Also, there is a danger in sorting things in an academic perfect way,
> when programmers don't have the same facilities in their programming
> language or operating system. Imagine that Firebird sort french as
> indicated by Dave.


> Now what mess will happen when the application
> itself won't be able to sort in the same way (when sorting in memory
> for instance). Just try to make Windows sort a french string using Dave
> full recipe...

A good Internet dig will uncover tools that let ordinary programs
perform all these "intuitively obvious" sorts. Of course, you'll need a
special sort for FR-FR, FR-BE, FR-SW, FR-CA ...

Nobody promised that this would be simple.

Cheers,


Ann