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Re: the discussion so far

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 75 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 75 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Jorgen Schaefer <forcer@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> String collation is very complex, as the "preferred" order of
> characters depends on the locale. But since STRING<? and friends
> are often used for things like binary search trees where the exact
> order is irrelevant and the only important thing is the existance
> of any kind of total order, defining them the way this SRFI does -
> by using the codepoint sequence - is good, because it is fast. If
> the implementation wants to provide the locale-dependent string
> collation, fine, but that's not useful for this SRFI to define.

This would make sense *only* if users would know that string<? might
give them wrong results on fancy systems if they use it for indexing.

So how about specifying two functions, one that implements a total
order for use where you don't care what the order is, and another
which guarantees the human-sensible text sorting method.  Simple
systems can simply eq the procedures; fancy systems can make fancy
differences.

Programmers will be on alert, and can use the correct name for
whichever they are using.