I wasn't wanting to translate words. But when we do a comparison on the z, we basically just do a byte-for-byte compare. That does not always give the proper result. I am not very familar with "culturally correct" collations. But I do remember (from 10e7 years ago) that in Spanish, the "ch" is considered a single character which collates after "c" and before "d". So, from one stand point, to do a "correct" compare would somehow need to say that the string: "chorizo" is greater than "ciudad". But in both CP-1047 and ISO8859-1, this is not true.
But I now see from what Mr. Gilmore has been saying that I am perhaps wanting too much from a computer language. I will need to depend on the programmer actually doing the proper things in all of his/her programs. So that when I use chorizo in English it will show up before cider, but if I-the-programmer know that Spanish is the "locale", that it is after ciudad. I don't know how this can be done generically. Especially if one throws words in Latin characters into a list with words in Greek characters. On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Gord Tomlin < [email protected]> wrote: > On 2013-10-28 14:35, John Gilmore wrote: > >> I am not sure I understand what "handle translations of string data >> from one language to another" means. Something like google translate#? >> >> > I was just guessing as to John M's intent, but I wouldn't be surprised if > he meant something along the lines of Google Translate. I don't want to put > words in his mouth, so I will let him elaborate. > > Translations of this sort can be useful, but they are not yet reliable >> enough to be usable in a notionally deterministic program, and they >> often do very badly in the presence of semantic ambiguity. >> > > Agreed. > > > -- > > -- > > Regards, Gord Tomlin > Action Software International > (a division of Mazda Computer Corporation) > Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507 > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**---------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
