XBOX 360 2562

Clbuttical (Pre-koine) greek can have a plethora of diacritical marks as well.

Some convey grammatical syntax, some are "inside-word punctuation", others are pronounciation buttists.

This was done mostly right from the start. If ISO had taken this as a path to extent ascii things would have looked a lot better.

Pictograms can also be handled similarly, adressing them as combination of radicals. It uses a lot less code space, is vastly more flexible, and sorts get a lot simpler.

On the contrary. If you just ignore all the diacriticals you get "library sorting". If you add diacritical as if they were a LSB of the main character you also get a sensible sorting; this is what census data and public records normally do.

And, indeed, there are well established rules for how you integrate cyrlillic, greek and hebrew into a base of latin sorting. Such rules also exist for Arabic, Hangul and Katakana, but that is a squeze.

So the idea of a library that has an integrated set of literature in several languages is to stretch the imagination too far?

A spec'ed sorting method can be well specified, and yet hideously complex to implement. The chinese radical ("dictionary") sort done on an UTF-8 stream will be an interesting exercise.

Didn't the Scots define their own dialect long before that?

Or perhaps Scottish would qualify as a language prior to 1700?

-- mrr