Re: [elephant-devel] Sorting

2007-10-22 Thread Robert L. Read
On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 16:38 -0400, Ian Eslick wrote: > Well here are the open decisions: > > - Characters as an independent type or a numeric type? Can we usefully think of Unicode characters as a numeric type? The real problem is that each culture uses a different collation order, so it is hard t

Re: [elephant-devel] Sorting

2007-10-22 Thread Ian Eslick
Well here are the open decisions: - Characters as an independent type or a numeric type? - Case sensitive vs. insensitive string/symbol/pathname sorting? (insensitive was the policy implemented by the original developers) - Settle on a standard type ordering and find some way to do a range qu

Re: [elephant-devel] Sorting

2007-10-22 Thread Robert L. Read
I think this is the best policy that we can generate. I personally don't like it, as I've mentioned before. I don't think we should have an arbitrary order. If you don't have a specified order, then you don't really have a btree in meaningful sense. You can't do a range query over something th

Re: [elephant-devel] Sorting

2007-10-22 Thread Ian Eslick
Lisp, by the way, only allows comparisons between characters in terms of their code. So sorting them as one of numerous numeric values, or independently by code, is adding to the lisp spec, not violating it. Ian On Oct 22, 2007, at 1:18 PM, Ian Eslick wrote: There have been a number of dis

[elephant-devel] Sorting

2007-10-22 Thread Ian Eslick
There have been a number of discussions about sorting issues and guarantees among the various data store implementations. This is difficult due to different backend serialized representations. This is my understanding of the current guarantees. Let's commit to this as part of locking dow