Subject: Another use for Tailorability of script attributes

From: [email-masked]
Date: 25 Mar 94 16:57:00 -0500

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This morning, the developer who is working on enhancing our DOS/SORT replacement
for LOCALEs did by chance communicate with me to ask me if I minded to add a
feature (independent of LOCALES, which already give the possibility, and the
default ordering ISO/IEC project too) to be able to do a reverse sort even at
the first level.  The LOCALE attributes gave him this idea.

He said, as a linguist (he is a high-level developer who has been specialized
for years in automatic translation; he was part of the team who first came with
a workable product in the world), there is a need to have sorts that begin with
word endings even at the first level (to get, for example a list of all words
ending with "tion", whatever their length).  I told him it was a good idea.  I
think it is not bad that a default have this feature implemented at the second
level (at the 1st level it is not for everybody!, nobody will argue against
that) so that quality of implementation of this tailorability feature be
guaranteed.

Btw some have been misled about our general approach when I said on the
ISO10646 list that our LOCALE-sensitive feature was available only in DOS.
FRANCIS is available on all platforms (IBM mainframes, UNIX-based systems,
systems able to compile ANSI-C source dode, MS/DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and
also for DBMS systems with exit facilities for input and output).  The only
thing available only in DOS and Windows is the LOCALE-compile feature of the
SORT.  Otherwise we provide all tools to compare/sort/search/merge culturally
sensitive data on all these platforms, based on the 6-language default (Dutch,
English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese).  This could be enhanced by
changing tables slightly for other needs and, better, to be LOCALE-sensitive
everywhere (for which enhancement we were lacking development money).

Alain LaBont<e'>
Qu<e'>bec