Le 01-mars-05, à 22:51, Ann W. Harrison a écrit :

>> 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'.

Ah Ah ! You're absolutely right about Unicode and Academie Francaise.

>> 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.
> 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.

Sure, there is surely always a solution. It's just that I have rarely
seen a computer program sort french in any of these "academic" ways (FB
being the closest to the academic way).

Even though, as conclusion, I have to agree the best choice that can be
done for a default collation for some language and location, is the
most academic one. That's the one, in the end, nobody can challenge. We
just need to add (or to keep if they exist) relatively easy techniques
to let users develop variants of these academic defaults.

--
Olivier Mascia