Hi, looks like this weekend's (routing?) problems related to mail delivery to @gnu.org addresses, which were also noticed by at least three other people, are resolved now :)
I forwarded my mail to the Debian BTS (since it didn't get delivered at first), but the people that read it there did not get its actual intention (and if multiple people do so, the sender likely did something wrong). Reading this Debian bug would not provide any additional useful information. * Assaf Gordon [2016-05-16 15:07 -0400]: > On 05/14/2016 10:17 AM, Carsten Hey wrote: > >the man page sort(1) contains a misleading description of the option -n: > [...] > > > > $ man sort | grep -A1 -- --numeric-sort | sed -n -e 's/^ *//' -e '1!p' > > compare according to string numerical value > [...] > >This description reads as if this command: > > > >$ printf '%s\n' 'x 9' 'x 10' | sort -n > >x 10 > >x 9 > [...] > >but instead, -n stops doing its magic after finding the first > >non-numeric, non-whitespace character. There is a short and simple > >way to summarize this behaviour. > > IIUC, you are disputing the accuracy (or clarity) of the term "string > numerical value" on the manual page, and not the actual behavior of > "sort -n" … Exactly. It seems like many people have problems to understand mails that contain code, but are neither a patch nor complain about the behaviour of a program - maybe my wording was suboptimal too. I'll consider this in future when I write similar mails. > The description says "string numeric value" - which (to me) does not > mean anything other than numeric value (implying letters will not be > sorted properly), but opinions clearly differ. We all know that '1st', '2nd', '3rd', …, '9th', '10th' and so on are sorted in this order if -n is used. We also know that piping lines that match ./[0-9][0-9]* to sort -n (which happens every time I upgrade my mobile's operating system) is a useless use of -n. Neither the description of -n in the man page, nor the explanation how you would read these words explain this difference in any way, at least without an additional definition of "string numeric value". > If you have a suggestion for improved wording, I'm sure they can be > considered for inclusion. If I would not know that "string numeric value" is proper English, I wouldn't consider it to be correct, hence I'm likely the wrong person to suggest a concrete wording, … > the description in the man page is derived from "sort --help", > and thus kept brief. …, especially, when it needs to be that short. I assume that a brief and proper description would either contain the word "beginning" or the word "initial". Suggestions I have at the moment are "sort a text's initial numeric parts", "sort initial numeric parts of a text" and "sort numbers at the beginning of a text", but a native speaker is likely able to find something better and more correct (actually, the initial numeric parts aren't sorted, they are used as sorting key). Due to the need to translate those stings, a change after a release might be better than a change before a release. Thanks, Carsten
