Re: [MacPerl] The MacPerl Pages and book (update)

[Lasse Hiller¿e Petersen <lassehp@imv.aau.dk>]

At 9:20 -0800 30/10/1997, Brian L. Matthews wrote:
>Lasse =?iso-8859-1?Q?Hiller=F8e?= Petersen writes:
>|But suddenly sorting names has turned out to be pretty complex.
>
>Even ignoring accented characters and such it's complex. For example,
>at one time names starting with Mac, Mc, and M' were all sorted as if
>they started with Mac. That requirement's been relaxed today, I suspect
>because no one ever does it.

I would guess this was relaxed when business and administrating computing
began, and proper sorting was not within reach of the computational power
then avaiable. But my comment on complexity wasn't related to the special
cases, but rather on the need to implement the proper ordering in the
situation where locale cannot be used. (This is not only a MacPerl issue,
for example A/UX has no locale support worth mentioning, I believe.)
Whether ISO-8859-1 was designed deliberately so the order would not allow
sorting, I do not know. It probably was.

(The old charset ISO-646 (DK), still used in many systems, replaced {|}[\]
with ¾¿Œ®¯�, therefore in the correct order.)

>The Chicago Manual of Style has 8 pages of fairly small print on
>alphabetizing personal names. Many of the rules depend upon the
>national origin of the name's owner.

Of course, with Perl we could probably implement these rules without too
much difficulty. :-)

I suppose this is no longer much related to MacPerl...

Anyway, it seems that MacPerl used to support a Mac-specific \w character
class, but now is more strict about this, in accordance with v. 5.004 in
general. Which I believe is fine.

I doubt this is the last time the Perl community will have to face the
character set problem, though.

-Lasse



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