It always struck me that any attempt to alphabetize names, especially ones that were written "full" (so that the machine had to determine what part of the seven-word name was the last (family) name, and what part was the middle name, etc.) would be doomed to failure. I just used an extra column in the spreadsheet (field in the database) to enter a "faux" string that would be used for alphabetization. If the alphabetization string failed to perform as expected, it was simply modified. The column / field would usually be non-printing in any printout of the list.
Fred Holmes At 12:04 PM 12/26/2009, rleesimon wrote: >Yes, in 1965-66 as an undergraduate I took a computer course at NYU which >comprised learned to program (entry level, PL-1) and my assigned project was >writing a routine to alphabetize a list of names including all variants >(multiple first, middle names, hyphenated, with degrees, etc.) ...which took >a whole semester and didn't actually function for all variants in the end. >The horrible input was standing around waiting to sit at a punch card >machine (do you hear hangin'chads?) and then wait months for an opening to >run the thing with your stack of cards (a shoebox-full) at 2am when you were >called to do it. Yes, it occupied an entire floor of the building with a/c >trailers outside as well. I seem to recall the model IBM 360/30 and there >were disk drives and all kinds of stuff in there (a clean room, remember >"bugs" ??) ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
