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When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

sebastiano.tronto.net

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Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#101

Post by Certhas »

armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

Agreed.What's more, the idea that people learn to put leading zeros is wrong and impractical, unless you know in advance how many digits you need. When you go from version 5.9.17 to 5.10.0 you don't go back and relabel every existing folder as 5.09.17.

The today standard way of sorting is well defined, unambiguous, and natural. Lexographic has its place, but user facing interfaces ain't it.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#102

Post by ploxiln »

armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience that even non-technical users already have.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#103

Post by Certhas »

derriz wrote: post #60
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

I'm not sure I agree. I think I could be convinced if there was a unique and universal representation for numeric values using characters. But we have so many textual representations of numeric values that I'm assuming the "mind-reading" goodness only works for a small subset. And the subset will be somewhat intuitive for developers but unlikely to be so for non-technical people. For example, does the order handle nu…

The sort rules are simple (1). Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. So for example version numbers (which must be massively more common than decimals in filenames) work correctly, and 5.9 is indeed smaller than 5.10 and the latter is not identical to 5.1 .

Given that this idea goes back more than two decades, has been the default behaviour of the most used OSes for many years, with no major outcry, I think empirically we can be fairly certain that it does not routinely lead to a lot of surprises and confusion.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sort_order

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#105

Post by systoll »

derriz wrote: post #60
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

I'm not sure I agree. I think I could be convinced if there was a unique and universal representation for numeric values using characters. But we have so many textual representations of numeric values that I'm assuming the "mind-reading" goodness only works for a small subset. And the subset will be somewhat intuitive for developers but unlikely to be so for non-technical people. For example, does the order handle nu…

The entire idea that numbers would be treated on a character by character basis rather than as numbers is somewhat intuitive for developers and not for non-technical people.

The answer to all of those questions is no for lexicographic ordering. Lexicographic ordering leads to surprise and confusion as a result.

> It's like a feature request that initially sounds reasonable and useful but once you explore the requirements in detail you realize there are too many edge cases to be able to meet the request in a non-brittle way.

It's been on windows and macOS for coming up on 25 years, and is in practically every modern UI. It’s reasonable.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#106

Post by 1970-01-01 »

orphea wrote: post #45
1970-01-01 wrote: post #8

Digits and any other characters that are not A-Z and a-z should not get sorted. That's the true result of doing what you asked and not what you meant. Pedantic, but that's why we are here.

> Digits and any other characters that are not A-Z and a-z should not get sorted. Do you suggest that sorting in any language other than English should be broken?

No.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#107

Post by jcynix »

_9ptr wrote: post #89
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want. I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?

And where do you sort the letter ä? (After a is correct in German, but I think Swedish does it differently.)

That's why we have all this LC_* stuff in Linux, which you can configure to your needs:

  export  LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE"
  export  LC_MONETARY="de_DE" 
  export  LC_PAPER="de_DE"                             
  export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8  
  export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"        
  export LC_RESPONSE="en_US.UTF-8"  
  export LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
Mix in your Swedish or Swaheli, maybe even the Vatican State:

   e.g. de_DE, sw_TZ, it_VA (not guaranteed ;-).

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#108

Post by Certhas »

II2II wrote: post #90
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the classic filenames with decimal points and scientific notation in them, so common...

Here's a different scenario: filenames with dates in them. Consider September Budget and October Budget . September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is n…

So the argument is that because this doesn't solve the challenge of ordering all possible strings by semantic meaning it should not be used?

Even though it increases the match between semantic meaning and string sorting in many important cases and is a simple and consistent rule?

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#109

Post by [deleted] »

armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

[deleted]

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#110

Post by furyofantares »

furyofantares wrote: post #26

Numbers aren't in the alphabet. So no, you don't mean alphabetical order.

I felt a little bad about this snark but actually, author barely understands their own use case (says they want alphabetical order but they actually want something more) and barely understands the UI they're using (says they asked for alphabetical order but none of the file managers they used says it has any such setting) and then they go on to claim this is to satisfy dumb users:

> Well, apparently all these operating systems have decided that no, users are too dumb and they cannot possibly understand what alphabetical order means.

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