[Lexicog] Sorting

[David Frank]

on March 21, John Koontz wrote:

There are probably various ways to handle sorting, but Bob Hsu used to
discuss it in terms of sorting handles, which are transformations of the
sorted elements into character strings for which the collating sequence does
match the desired sorting order.  For example, if you want upper and lower
case to be treated the same, convert upper case to lower case in the handle.
If you want a-acute to be treated like a, convert a-acute to a in the
handle....

from David Frank:

It looks like what you called a sorting handle is what I was calling an
alphabetic key when applied to a dictionary record. (See my second message
of March 19.) You went on to say, "Ideally the sorting program will generate
these handles on the fly as it needs them, based on your sorting rules, but,
if you don't have access to a clever sorting program you can always create
the handles manually yourself and make sure the sorting program uses them to
sort with rather than the nominal key.  You have to delete them from some
kinds of output, of course."

My practice and my proposal was to keep an alphabetic key as part of each
entry, but it would be a nonprinting field and used only for sorting. An
advantage of keeping it as part of the entry is that you could, for example,
manually convert "an bagay" to BAGAY AN if you want it to sort after
"bagay", but keep the default order in other cases, depending on which word
in the phrase you want to use as the basis for sorting.




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