[Python-Dev] order of Misc/ACKS (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Fri Nov 11 13:12:18 CET 2011

The key point here is that it is rough alphabetic order. IMO, sorting accented characters along with their unaccented versions would be fine as well, and be more practical. In general, it's not possible to provide a "correct" alphabetic order. For example, in German, 'ö' sorts after 'o', whereas in Swedish, it sorts after 'z'. In fact, in German, we have two different ways of sorting the ö: one is to treat it is a letter after o, and the other is to treat it as equivalent to oe.

This is really interesting. I guess lexical ordering of alphabet letters is a locale thing, but Misc/ACKS isn't supposed to be any special locale. It makes me wonder whether it's possible to have a contradiction in the ordering, i.e. have a set of names that just can't be sorted in any order acceptable by everyone. We can then call it "the Misc/ACKS incompleteness theorem" ;-)

Eli

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