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[Python-Dev] order of Misc/ACKS

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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