Subject: SC22 N2469 - Canada Vote on SC22 LB N2364 - String Ordering

From: "william c. rinehuls" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 May 1997 18:01:09 -0400 (EDT)

____________________beginning of title page _____________________
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
N2469

May 1997

TITLE:             Vote of Canada on SC22 Letter Ballot N2364 Received
                   After Ballot Closure (CD Ballot for CD 14651 - 
                   Information technology - International String
                   Ordering - Method for Comparing Character Strings
                   and Description of a Default Tailorable Ordering)

SOURCE:            Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22

WORK ITEM:         JTC 1.22.30.02.02

STATUS:            N/A

CROSS REFERENCE:   SC22 N2364, N2466

DOCUMENT TYPE:     SC22 Member Body Vote

ACTION:            To SC22 Member Bodies for information.

                   The comments accompanying the affirmative vote from
                   the Canada Member Body have been forwarded to WG20
                   for consideration.

Address reply to:
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat
William C. Rinehuls
8457 Rushing Creek Court
Springfield, VA 22153  USA
Tel:  +1 (703) 912-9680
Fax:  +1 (703) 912-2973
email:  [email-masked]

___________________end of title page; beginning of comments ______________

Canadian position on CD 14651 ballot (JTC1/SC22 N 2364)

The Canadian NB votes YES to the question asking if this CD is
satisfactory to be voted on as a Draft International Standard with the
following comments that have to be accommodated.
___________________

Technical comments:
___________________

1.Add a note at the end of 5.1.2 to indicate that escape sequences should  
be filtered out or transformed during the prehandling phase:

2.At least in annex 1 put the following note: "In this default ordering
table, a number of scripts are missing, in some cases due to lack of  
data at time of editing, in other cases due to the non-inclusion of those
scripts in 10646 at time of publishing. It is the intent of ISO/IEC to  
complete ordering of those scripts explicitly in the default whenever data  
becomes available by way of amendments to this international standard. In
the meantime, implementers are encouraged to take advantage of tailoring  
to meet user sorting requirements. If the default table is not tailored  
for unspecified characters, then an implicit order is assigned in the  
following table, which might not meet user requirements of a particular  
community".

3. The toggles should be moved from the API to the pre-handling phase

  A liaison statement from WG14 has informed us that having toggles in the
  API clashed with the C/POSIX i18n model, in which the APIs should be
  culturally neutral and all cultural/localization data should be given via 
  the locale.

  In order to preserve the model, yet retain the ease of use of the toggles
  for tailoring the table, we propose the following:

  p. 19 and 23: Remove the order_accents, order_case and sign_espace 
  parameters and modify the text accordingly.

  We disagree with the intentional mistakes made for implementing the  
  toggles in the table data in annex 1. We strongly suggest that a syntactic 
  preprocessing mechanism handling toggles specifically be implemented
  in ISO/IEC 14651 and documented in ISO/IEC 14652. Where the intentional
  mistakes have been done in the default table, replace the occurrences by 
  conditional statements similar to these :

  a) for space/NBSP toggling:

  #if ToggleSpace
     <00A0> IGNORE...    [definition of NBSP]
  #else
     <0020> IGNORE...    [definition of SPACE]
   .
   .
   .
  #if ToggleSpace
     <0020> <espace>...    [definition of SPACE]
  #else
     <0040> <espace>...    [definition of NBSP]

  b) for accent scanning toggling:
  
  #if ToggleAccents
     order_start <La>;forward;forward...
  # else
     order_start <La>;forward;backward...

c)   for precedence of case toggling (the idea is here in one occurrence  
     to omit or put the MIN symbol before CAP in sequence and in the other
     occurrence to put or omit the MIN symbol after CAP in sequence.  The
     CAP symbol occurs somewhere between the two statements below):
 
  #ifnot ToggleCapsMin <MIN>
   .
   .
   .
  #if ToggleCapsMin  <MIN>

  With such a syntax, toggles "ToggleSpace", "ToggleAccents" and
  "ToggleCapsMin"  shall be turned ON by a specific statement specified in 
  ISO/IEC 14652. If not turned ON, they are OFF by default and need not be 
  mentioned in the tailoring.

  Before final compilation of the table in prehandling, the toggles shall
  modify the table and thereby affect the ordering as intended.

__________________

Editorial comments
__________________

  I. Make the introduction smaller and the explanations in an informative 
    annex. Essential paragraphs that should stay in the introduction are 
    suggested to be the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th and 10th.

 II. In 5.1.2 after "to transform fields" add "and unstructured records  
    into structured fields".

III. Annex I Dialog Box should be only applicable to what is in ISO/IEC  
    14651. Irrelevant elements such as system direction, bidirectional
    options and text behaviour should be removed.

IV. p. 17, put explanatory parenthesis after each subprogramme name the  
    first time it is used.

V.p.18 change "parameters de sortie" to "output parameters".

 VI. p.26 rephrase 5.3.2 to make understood the relationship between 
    symbolic tables and numeric tokens. Indicate how subkeys are arranged
    to form a key and suggest how to use that key to make binary 
    comparisons (with special considerations for the delimiters between
    keys and a note, mentioning that there is a possibility to avoid them,
    with references).

VII. Put the tutorial as an informative annex.

VIII. Remove or complete incomplete references in Annex C, i.e. references  
    to non-documents.

IX.p.51 Title for "Control characters" should read "Control characters
    and associated symbols; caractères de commande et symboles associés".

______________________end of document SC22 N2469 ________________________