On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Terry Reedy
If I were committing a patch and was checking to see whether a name that started with a decorated A (or any other letter) were already in the list, I would look in the appropriate place in the A (or other) section, not after Z.
Everyone working on the English-based Python distribution knows the order of the 26 English letters. Please use that order (including for decorated versions and tranliterations) instead of various idiosyncratic and possibly conflicting nationality-based rules.
I believe, the golden standard for this type of works can be found in the index pages of The Art of Computer Programming, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/help.html#exotic It would be quite an effort to redo Misc/ACKS in that way, and even with ASCII transliteration of every name, there is still ambiguity: is "Van Rossum" sorted under "V", or under "R"? (See http://www.python.org/~guido/ for an answer.) Since it is apparent that no formal rule can be agreed upon, I think best effort "rough alphabetical" order is just fine. BTW, what is Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis' last name? :-)