[Python-Dev] [Python-checkins] r83893 - python/branches/release27-maint/Misc/ACKS
Alexander Belopolsky
alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Tue Aug 10 17:47:15 CEST 2010
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:53 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> 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
More information about the Python-Dev
mailing list