On 2010-07-29 02:19, Jon Lang wrote:
Michael Zedeler wrote:
Jon Lang wrote:
This is definitely something for the Unicode crowd to look into. But
whatever solution you come up with, please make it compatible with the
notion that "aardvark".."apple" can be used to match any word in the
dictionary that comes between those two words.
The key issue here is whether there is a well defined and meaningful
ordering of the characters in question. We keep discussing the nice
examples, but how about "apple" .. "ส้ม"?
All I'm saying is: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Come
up with an interim solution that handles the nice examples intuitively
and the ugly examples poorly (or better, if you can manage that right
out of the gate); then revise the model to improve the handling of the
ugly examples as much as you can; but while you do so, make an effort
to keep the nice examples working.
I am sorry if what I write is understood as an argument against ranges
of strings. I think I know too little about Unicode to be able to do
anything but point at some issues, I belive we'll have to deal with. The
solution is not obvious to me.
I don't know enough about Unicode to suggest how to solve this. All I can
say is that my example above should never return a valid Range object unless
there is a way I can specify my own ordering and I use it.
That actually says something: it says that we may want to reconsider
the notion that all string values can be sorted. You're suggesting
the possibility that "a" cmp "ส้" is, by default, undefined.
Yes, but I am sure its due to my lack of understanding of Unicode.
Regards,
Michael.
