On Monday 05 February 2007, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> I think we have some kind of conflicting requirements here: You either
> want to be able to sort floating point numbers. You then need to
> interpret the decimal delimiter. Or you want to be able to sort version
> numbers. You then must not interpret the decimal delimiter.
Indeed.
I hadn't realized that difference, which means that any generic code that implements
"natural sorting" must take into account those two different requirements/algorithms.
> What about resolving this conflict by having two options (or three, if
> the include the default character code based sorting) instead of one,
> "natural-integer" and "natural-float", where the first one sorts only
> integer values, while the 2nd one sorts floats?
Well, now that we identified two ways of doing natural sorting, we still need
to answer: are both ways useful in spreadsheets? I admit that I'm the one who
broadened the scope of the discussion, thinking about that code for filemanagers
we have, but if the spreadsheet authors say that from a spreadsheet point of view
we only need the natural-float mechanism, then that's fine with me. No point in
specifying things that are not useful.
--
David Faure, , sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
