Hello Olivier,

Tuesday, March 1, 2005, 4:38:29 PM, you wrote:

> Le 01-mars-05, à 19:49, Ann W. Harrison a écrit :

>> Actually, the collation problem will continue to be more complicated
>> than that because most serious collations are multi-level. There
>> isn't a simple byte for byte transformation that makes the sort "work".

> I, generally, agree.

>> The way the current collations work is to assign a byte value to the
>> "base" character (e.g. 'A'), then append a bits that give value to
>> different accents, upper vs lower case, and the following white space
>> or
>> punctuation.
>>
>> Here is Dave Schnepper's explanation of the issue:
>>
>> The InterBase collation orders for ISO8859 (such as SV_SV) follow a
>> full
>> linguistic (eg: dictionary) collation order. In such a collation order
>> spaces (and other punctuation marks) are of 4th level importance.
>>
>> 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".

Have you paid to how ISO8859-1 COLLATE FR_FR sorts the data? It's
exactly the dictionary sort, as in Ann's example.

> 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 ?

If they know what ASCII codes mean. My users basically know how to
start the computer and use the software that's on it. And, I
personally prefer the dictionary sort order(and I'm french).

> My point is that there is a large difference in what people expect from
> general business softwares compared to what is presented to them when
> they open the latest edition of a famous french dictionnary.

Not if you're talking about secretaries. All those that I deal with
expect the dictionary sort.

--
Best regards,
Daniel Rail
Senior Software Developer
ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.filopto.com)