> I believe that within the context of a global subscript, the values are all > strings. No distinction is made between what one may call 'numbers' and all > other concatenations of characters. Only as the subscript values are > interpreted outside of the context of an global subscript value do > characters become 'numbers'. Is this not so? > > Richard.
The values of global subscripts are all strings. The COLLATION of those strings is important when talking about strings as global subscripts. The collation is the order that the strings are returned by the $ORDER() function. This depends on the character set profile. The standard charset M uses the collation rule called "M Collation" This collation rule uses the STRING Collation rule except for strings which are canonical numbers. (ie: no leading zeros, no trailing zeros past the decimal point, no non-numeric characters.) The numeric collation effectively organizes the "most negative" numbers first, in increasing order, then zero, then the positive numbers later until the most positive numbers. Only after the numbers are in order are the strings of characters found in the collation sequence (except for the strings that are the string representation of canonical numbers) in order of their character set collation, with longer strings found later than the shorter strings which are their prefixes. (what is commonly called lexicographic order). Examples: this means "-100" will collate before "-1", with "-1" collating before "1", with "1" collating before "12", with "2" collating before "12" and after "1" with "3" collating before "4" and after "2" "B" collates before "Ba" but after "A" and after "Aa" ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
