[Lexicog] Sort order problem

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

>> One reason to order space before the letters is that
>> it is easy to end up with unintended spaces at the end of a
>> line, but hard to see them.
>Shouldn't that be easily taken care of by global search-and-replace all
>spaces before a line break in the \lx field? Doing this in a text editor
>indeed.

Sure, that is one way to handle the problem, but it requires you to
remember to to do such a search-and-replace, in each file, every time
you edit it or every time you print it.

Another approach is to trim excrescent spaces before sorting in the
software that generates the text from the database. That isn't too
hard, if you control the software, though it is a bit of a pain in
low-level languages than in the higher-level languages people are
likely to use for text processing these days.

I'm not saying that ordering spaces before letters is a necessity
nowadays, though it may still be the easiest approach if one doesn't
control the software and doesn't want to have to remember to do
the global search-and-replace. It is, however, a reason that in
the past people used this ordering, and may well be the reason
for this ordering in ASCII.

Bill



 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/