by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/04/17 17:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/04/17/2166496.aspx
The reason why these comparisons are popular is not because they make sense. The order, in fact, when based on code point value (as most implementations are), is an entirely arbitrary and non-intuitive side effect of the place in which characters are encoded in Unicode.
This is when you think about it a somewhat ridiculous kind of methodology to even pretend to use for sensible results.
But when one should not be using linguistically appropriate results, it becomes the only choice.
Well, the only choice available in Microsoft products, at least....
Surely there must be something that might have been or might be better though, right?
I'll give some of my random off-the-cuff thoughts on this topic tomorrow (and point out flaws in some of the ideas that have been suggested by others in this space!)....
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