On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

Was it on IRC? I do remember discussion, but forgot the answer. :(

python-dev or python-checkins I think, but I don't really remember. (Not IRC though, as I only very rarely drop in on the channel)

Do you agree that ACKS should be the same in the active branches? I'll fix the order when I merge the lists.

The most important one to keep up to date is the one for the main development branch, since that should be a superset of all the others. The maintenance branches will naturally be missing new contributors (aside from those contributing bug fixes for that branch), and that's OK. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:53 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote: ..

People need to recognize that any kind of reference is really irrelevant here. There is no "right" order that is better than any other "right" order. I'd personally object to any English language dictionary telling me how my name sorts in the alphabet.

Even when an English language dictionary follows German rules? :-) BTW, I did quietly bring Peter Åstrand back to the end of the list yesterday and I agree that this is rather unimportant.

(and yes, I do think it's "wrong" that it got sorted after Lyngvig - in Germany, we put the ö as if it was "oe" - unlike the Swedes, which put the very same letter after the rest of the alphabet. So the ö in Chrigström sorts in a different way than the ö in Löwis. If I move to Sweden, the file would have to change :-)

I did search the mail archives for the discussion of Å's sorting order and now I think that the reference to Swedish rules is an ex-post rationalization. It looks like the original order was by Latin-1 code point and that explains both Å and ö positions. (I actually believe that the Swedish rules are fairly modern as well. Unlike other nations, Swedes don't mind breaking with traditions for modern conveniences. As far as I know, Sweden is the only nation where polite "you" (plural) was abolished by a language reform.) I raised this issue after one of my early check-ins got a response that acknowledgments should be alphabetized rather than added at the end of the list. [1] I pointed out that given that the file is encoded in UTF-8, it can potentially have last names starting with any unicode character and I was not familiar with any formal procedure that would define an alphabetic order in this case. A short brainstorming session on IRC and the tracker resulted with an agreement that no formal rule exists and the best we can do is to define the order as "rough". I am not 100% happy with this because I am sure people will keep discovering that the order in the file does not match the order suggested by their favorite sort program. I was also hoping to learn from this discussion what the state of the art in in sorting unicode words is. I believe this issue is addressed by some obscure parts of the unicode standard, but I am not familiar with them. [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-checkins/2010-May/093650.html

On 8/10/2010 3:25 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

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.

Since the list is now utf-8 instead of latin-1 encoded, we could include the actual native character name, if supplied, in parentheses after the English-alphabetized transliteration. If we were to follow native rules, all Japanese names, for instance, should be separately listed and ordered according to the Japanese order, which is quite different from the European orders. -- Terry Jan Reedy

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Terry Reedy wrote: ..

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? :-)

I am not 100% happy with this because I am sure people will keep discovering that the order in the file does not match the order suggested by their favorite sort program. I was also hoping to learn from this discussion what the state of the art in in sorting unicode words is. I believe this issue is addressed by some obscure parts of the unicode standard, but I am not familiar with them.

Actually, it's not. Rather, Unicode acknowledges that collation depends on the locale, see http://unicode.org/reports/tr10/ Of course, it would be possible to follow the Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET). Regards, Martin

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 6:29 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote: ..

So where do you put Γεώργιος Μπουτσιούκης?

or Александр Белопольский for that matter? :-)

Am 11.08.2010 00:35, schrieb Alexander Belopolsky:

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 6:29 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote: ..

...

So where do you put Γεώργιος Μπουτσιούκης?

or Александр Белопольский for that matter? :-)

If you care about that, feel free to add that spelling to the file. Somebody proposed to put it along with some latin transliteration, which I can sympathize with. If just the nickname in cyrillic is fine with you, it's of course fine, as well. Regards, Martin

On 8/10/2010 6:29 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

...

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.

So where do you put Γεώργιος Μπουτσιούκης?

As I said above, where the transliterated version Geor.. goes, with the tranliteration followed by '(Γεώργιος Μπουτσιούκης)' as I suggested elsewhere -- Terry Jan Reedy

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:25:52 -0400 Terry Reedy wrote:

Everyone working on the English-based Python distribution knows the order of the 26 English letters.

How does that solve anything? I just had to decide whether “Jason V. Miller” had to come before or after “Jay T. Miller” ('Jason' < 'Jay' but 'V' > 'T'). Knowledge of the “English” alphabet isn't enough to make a resolution: an idiosyncratic rule is still needed. (and before you claim that rule is well-known: I had to ask) Regards Antoine.