>>This whole discussion of interleaved sorting has veered off into the >>ditch. Now maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention (quite >>possible, as I pretty much lost patience with the whole Phoenician >>thread a LONG time ago) > >Probably, I would hazard a guess, because you are not a user of these diascripts.
You're right; I'm not. But I think I would have lost patience with this discussion even if I was. It's been spinning around in circles, veering wildly off-topic, and degenerating into ad-hominem attacks for quite some time now. While there may still be occasional comments that advance the discussion, the signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and I'm not sure much of anyone is listening to each other anymore. >>Do you really expect-- in EITHER >>case-- to have long lists of words that need to be mechanically sorted? > >Yes. > > >>Do you expect it to happen often enough that hacking together a Perl >>script to do it once isn't going to get the job done? > >Yes. I'm not convinced yet. I understand your position to be in favor of representing Phoenician and its friends with the existing codes for Hebrew. If you do this, nothing special has to happen to get interleaved sorting because the actual letterforms involved become a presentation issue. In theory, even if Phoenician is encoded as a separate script, you can keep on doing what you're doing. If the other Semitic scholars also keep using the existing Hebrew code points, you don't need anything from Unicode, and anything that gets added you can safely ignore. So do you need an interleaved sorting order because you expect to be interchanging data with other people who have decided to use the new code points, or because you intend to use them yourself? Or is it a font issue (i.e., you'll want to use fonts that only map the new code points to the glyphs you want to see)? But if you _do_ interchange with people who use the new code points, you're right-- you do need an interleaved sorting order. So then the question goes to the people who are arguing against putting this into the default UCA sort order-- if the default UCA sort order interleaves Hebrew and Phoenician to make life easier for people like Dean, who does it hurt? Are there other user communities out there whose lives would be made harder if Hebrew and Phoenician were equivalent at the first level? Or are you concerned about setting a dangerous precedent? Or is it just the principle of the thing? >>Both are justification for an interleaved sort order, but really, how >>often will either use case come up? > >Well, for just one case, if you're a Dead Sea scroll scholar (one of the more populated sub-disciplines in >Semitic scholarship) all the time and every day. To do what? I'm not arguing with you; I'm just curious and completely ignorant. --Rich Gillam Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
