Michael Zedeler wrote: > Jon Lang wrote: >> This is definitely something for the Unicode crowd to look into. But >> whatever solution you come up with, please make it compatible with the >> notion that "aardvark".."apple" can be used to match any word in the >> dictionary that comes between those two words. > > The key issue here is whether there is a well defined and meaningful > ordering of the characters in question. We keep discussing the nice > examples, but how about "apple" .. "ส้ม"?
All I'm saying is: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Come up with an interim solution that handles the nice examples intuitively and the ugly examples poorly (or better, if you can manage that right out of the gate); then revise the model to improve the handling of the ugly examples as much as you can; but while you do so, make an effort to keep the nice examples working. > I don't know enough about Unicode to suggest how to solve this. All I can > say is that my example above should never return a valid Range object unless > there is a way I can specify my own ordering and I use it. That actually says something: it says that we may want to reconsider the notion that all string values can be sorted. You're suggesting the possibility that "a" cmp "ส้" is, by default, undefined. There are some significant problems that arise if you do this. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
