Most computer programs these days "alphabetize" by converting upper-case to lower-case (or possibly vice-versa) and then sorting on ASCII values. "_" is ASCII 95, while "." is ASCII 46. Thus, "_" comes after. (Note that if you do this, you definitely want to convert letters to lower-case; otherwise, the letters will come between those two symbols.) Similarly, in EBCDIC -- which no sane person would use for alphabetizing strings, even if it were still in use, because it puts things like "~" in the middle of the alphabet -- "." has a lexicographic value less than "_".
Alternately, the computer book I have handiest that has such symbols in its index (LaTeX: A Document Preparation System) puts "_" before ".".
In either case, though, they should both come before the letters. And it's nice to do like the book I mentioned, and put a nice little table of symbol-ordering in the margin of your alphabetized list.
Meanwhile, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with akosut and ejalbert about the various quirks of Unicode, and the various strangenesses it causes with ordering strings -- on account of the fact that many alphabets don't have a one-to-one mapping between upper- and lower-case, and sometimes what's one letter in one has to be two letters in the other. And then there's the quirks that come from the fact that there's no good solution to the problem of whether you want to have a different code for an "A" in different alphabets that alphabetize differently, and so forth. There's quite a remarkable lot of geekery potential in the matter, really.
I knew that there was much geek potential in this, for sure.
FWIW, this list is never going to be published, so I can just come up with any arbitrary scheme that pleases me (and don't have to include any helpful notes to anyone except myself). But -- ASCII values, of course!
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 11:34 pm (UTC)I'd send myself two emails, one titled 'test.' and one titled 'test_', then hit 'sort by title' on Eudora and see which one it thinks goes first.
I'm not sure if this is clever or pathetic.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 12:10 am (UTC)Most computer programs these days "alphabetize" by converting upper-case to lower-case (or possibly vice-versa) and then sorting on ASCII values. "_" is ASCII 95, while "." is ASCII 46. Thus, "_" comes after. (Note that if you do this, you definitely want to convert letters to lower-case; otherwise, the letters will come between those two symbols.) Similarly, in EBCDIC -- which no sane person would use for alphabetizing strings, even if it were still in use, because it puts things like "~" in the middle of the alphabet -- "." has a lexicographic value less than "_".
Alternately, the computer book I have handiest that has such symbols in its index (LaTeX: A Document Preparation System) puts "_" before ".".
In either case, though, they should both come before the letters. And it's nice to do like the book I mentioned, and put a nice little table of symbol-ordering in the margin of your alphabetized list.
Meanwhile, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 10:45 am (UTC)FWIW, this list is never going to be published, so I can just come up with any arbitrary scheme that pleases me (and don't have to include any helpful notes to anyone except myself). But -- ASCII values, of course!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 10:42 am (UTC)