[Info-vax] AlphaVM-free emulator with all additional peripheral components

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-02 17:46:00 +0000, Bob Koehler said:

> In article <seqe9-3b5.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture 
> <paul at sture.ch> writes:
>> 
>> "The collating sequence of lower case alphabetic characters is higher
>> than upper case and numerics are higher still — the exact opposite of
>> ASCII."
>> 
>> The collating sequence got me at one stage.  I was wondering if we had
>> enough disk space to sort a very large input file into ASCII sequence,
>> then it occurred to me to do two passes up the file outputting the
>> numerics first.
> 
>    Since A .lt. B depends on the charaacter set, Fortran added functions
>    to compare characters according to the ASCII collating sequence quite
>    a while ago.

Collation depends on the character encoding, and on the language.

(And the collation sequences aren't as static as might be expected.  
Spanish changed its collation for ch and ll a few years back, for 
instance.)

The National Replacement Character Set (NCS, et al) dealt with this on 
OpenVMS, but AFAIK that tool and that API has been deprecated.  Which 
leaves programmers with the I18N, locale and iconv-related pieces and 
the C library.  Or porting, or rolling your own.

-- 
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