Sort the words, sort the strings

However, in this particular case, the behavior was causing a problem when using SortedList with .NET Framework culture names as keys. Because the scenarios for which the word sort behavior is intuitive do not have among them a scenario like hyphenated tokens of 2-3 characters each. And although the string sort behavior works better here (since treating the hyphen as a symbol will give the behavior most would expect, in this scenario), there is actually a problem with that approach, namely the fact that the SortedList class does not give an easy way to apply the flag. To use it, you have to do something like implement an IComparer with a Compare call that uses the flag, which is the most common operation in the world....

This is made more complicated by the problems I pointed out previously in the post On approaching international programming....

Taking a step back, the names of the two sorts (string sort vs. word sort) do not give good clues in the words as to what each one does, anyway. So without docs, it would be hard to figure out which one to use in the first place!

The fact that the SortedList does not contain easy ways to get at these settings makes it (in my opnion) just a little less sorted, if you know what I mean. :-)