Talk:Ordered words: Difference between revisions

:: The REXX language was always English-centric (well, Latin letter centric, as least). The UPPER statement, function, and option was just designed for the Latin alphabet, and when porting REXX to be used with other alphabets becomes problematic and a subject worthy of a full discussion. [Note that some REXX support other languages for error messages. The names of the weekdays and months and various time suffixes are still in English, however, as well as the ''options'' of all functions.] The order of sorting characters is in itself, a field of study. The order in which various hardware sorts characters (or put in order) is also of interest. Some sort packages and other computer software allow for specifying (for instance) how to sort/order numeric digits: ASCII has them below letters, BCDIC and EBCDIC has them above. Also, ASCII has the uppercase Latin letters lower in a list, lowercase letters are higher. BCDIC and EBCDIC is the other way around. The German essett character ('''ß''') has two problems, it has no uppercase equivalent [other then SS], and in the German alphabet, the '''ß''' is normally listed after '''z'''. [This is due to the way it's pronounced.] Using the '''translate''' and/or '''upper''' instruction/option/function to uppercase (verb) non-Latin letters quickly degenerates into one heck of a mess; how would a computer language know ''a prioi'' how (or what) to ''uppercase'' (or to ''lowercase'')? It's a question that I'm not equipped to address. -- [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 17:51, 14 July 2012 (UTC)