So the question is whether Sybase tailorings, such as German, will be affected positively or negatively, and to what degree. If a German customer is accessing a database full of European names, and expects to find Ä with E, and Ä with A and Å with Z and Å with L, then he will be right *except* for the last one.
I am quite sure that DIN 5007 (the German collation standard) specifies an ordering like what John & Mark have proposed - for primary weights, strip accents etc. While it is still hard to implement something _completely_ conformant to DIN 5007 (try numeric sorting of roman numbers), it would be nice to get a bit closer.
[I am still looking for my copy of DIN 5007. Insert complaint about such standards not being online.]
Also, intuitively and personally, I would much prefer if à and à and such were all "interleaved" with o, for the reasons several repliers stated.
I don't see eng and other such letters in John's list, by the way, which should ease Michael's concern about interleaving eng with e.
As for sorting IPA, I think it's a non-issue for most of its users because they will see IPA in dictionaries which are sorted for the language, not for the pronunciation.
Best regards, markus
-- Opinions expressed here may not reflect my company's positions unless otherwise noted.
