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CC: Dan Sugalski <d...@sidhe.org>, perl6-intern...@perl.org
Subject: Re: [Q1] (Re: The strings design document)
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From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)

> 1) ISO-8859-1 is used to represent text in several different languages, 
> including German and Swedish. German and Swedish differ in their sort 
> order, even for things they have in common. (For example, ö 
> (o-with-diaeresis) is considered a separate letter in Swedish, but is 
> just a accented "o" in German.) So (assuming my strings aren't 
> explicitly langauge-tagged, or are tagged with "Dunno"), what sort 
> order does ISO-8859-1 define? I'm not sure whether the national 
> standards themselves actually define a sort order, so are we going to 

National standards yes, ISO 8859 (and the like) not.  In other words,
sorting standards exist, but they have (quite rightly) nothing to do
with sorting standards.  Real life sorting is messy (multiple passes,
some parts may be ignored in some passes, acronyms, etc.) and worlds
apart from "let's compare the bytes one by one" or even from "let's
compare code points" or even from "let's compare grapheme (clusters)".

> define one for every "character set"? In addition, many languages can 
> be represented in several different "character set", so that seems to 
> mean that the sort order for "öut" v. "out" will vary, depending on the 
> "character set" used for those strings?

FWIW, I think binding language to strings is a Mistake. But I have
decided to give up trying to argue anymore about it since Dan seems
to be convinced that it will solve some problems.