XBOX 360 2568

Oh, honey. I'm talking about writing a spec. There has to be a word for this kind of sorting such that I can state that fields a,b,c,d,e, and z are to be written using a mrziputx sort. That is why we name things in this computing biz....and that is why we started to document standards.

Good grief, Charlie Brown. This tells me nothing.

How do I handle a field that has nnnaaannnloveyyy in it, where nnn is numeric, aaa is alphameric, love is alphanumeric, and yyy is any character 000-777?

And you make the difference between last name and first name by the location and order of characters store in a field.

I know you're not a youngster. ARe we talking past each other? Or am I so out of date that sorting is not what it used to be?

OTOH, you just might be a youngster. I don't understand this comment at all. Don't sorting routines discard bad records this days?

Huh? Sorting is reading a disorganized set of bits and writing them out in an monitonically increasing order, (IOW, not randomly) according to a certain set of rules. We used to give these sets names when they were commonly done. The purpose of naming them was so we didn't have to waste eyeball wear on reviewing specs. Thus an increasing alphameric sort will input sets of bits, isolate the speficied fields, poocan any record that is not the letters A-Z and sort in such an order that A's are listed before B's; B's before C's; etc.

There is quite a bit more implied actions than this but I'm not teaching CBA sorting today.

If my posts aren't short and sweet today, it's because I'm peeed off at the IT biz today. My phone company has just notified me that they aren't going to return my cancelled checks to them anymore. However, they rebutture me (as does everything else that is doing this) that they will keep electronic pictures of the checks in their data bases. THIS IS A f***ING BIG SECURITY HOLE. Banks can't even manage to keep their account data confied inhouse. Every random bill collector is going promise me that nothing bad will happen? I bought me a ledger (which isn't really a ledger but that's nuther sadsack story because of everybody insisting everything be electronic) and I'll keep my books using the ledger rather than a checkbook. Banking is no longer furnishing the money management tools and buttists that they used to. They are no longer in the f***ing banking business. They have all become too big for their britches. Even the small banks are trying to act like the big ones.

BAH