FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Sorting & character sets

[Michael Phipps <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2003-12-22 at 22:14:21 [-0500], Andrew Bachmann wrote:
[snip]

> I think that we do not need to worry about the encoding of the string
> because we can do the typical beos thing and assume that the string is
> UTF-8.  BeOS has functions for converting to UTF-8 and from UTF-8,
> and if someone really wants to "fight the system", they can run their
> strings through those conversions every time they sort.

Just wanted to point out that for some people, it isn't so much an issue of 
"fight the system" - sometimes, you have a requirement to do so. Email and 
web page rendering are good examples. 

As far as the rest of it, as a native English speaker, I am sort of surprised 
that the issues are so fuzzy. In Spanish class, we learned, as has been 
brought up here, that ch, ll, rr, ene (n with a tilde) were distinct letters. 
Period. No question about it. So it has surprised me that there is debate 
over it within the Spanish speaking world. 

In any case, this is really more of an issue for the OpenTracker list than 
here. It doesn't make a lot of sense (to me, anyway) to have two different 
places with the same sort of discussion.