yTna and yonas,

    Well I mourn the loss of abass, I was looking forward to hearing and
benefitting from his insight. I think we will make a leap in progress once
the disk arives, until then there are some topic all ready brought up that
we can discuss.

    I did a little exploring with ascii and was surprised to find that the
address order is the sort order -!  At least on Unix, I don't know if phone
books and dictionaries would do the same.  What is very odd, to me at least,
is that there is a segregated punctuation hierarcy; some punctionation
precedes alphabetic characters in the sort order, some come after, and
one group is "alphabetically" between upper and lower case letters.  This
boggles my mind, I wonder if there is a historical reason for it.  Maybe the
Unix sort command is not the norm.  Anyway, the consequence is that this
list is lexicographically ordered :  A#, A5, AA, A_, Aa, A~ .

This seems unnatural to me, I would have imagined that in the sort order
all of the letters were grouped together, all of the numbers were a group,
and punctuation a 3rd group.  Then the list would have been correctly
ordered as :  AA, Aa, A5, A#, A_, A~   OR   A#, A_, A~, A5, AA, Aa
depending on your feelings about numeric and punctuation presendence.  But
the character types (letter, number, punct) fall into groups without sub
classes.

The readible ascii set has these zones :

[Punctuation I][Numbers][Punctuation II][UPPER CASE ALPHA][Punctuation III]
[lower case alpha][Punctuation IV]


The table I experimented with is at the end of this letter.  My thought for
fidel was to follow what I thought the ascii model was and to order the
matrix, and hence the character lexicon as : [Punctuation][Numbers][Fidel]
[Misc.]   Yonas and I conversed on this during the weekend and were in
agreement, are we still?  Do these examples shed light on the significance
of the issue?




ADD    CHAR
---    ----
032	 	" "
033		!
034		"
035		#
036		$
037		%
038		&
039		'
040		(
041		)
042		*
043		+
044		,
045		-
046		.
047		/
048		0
049		1
050		2
 .		.
 .		.
 .		.
056		8
057		9
058		:
059		;
060		<
061		=
062		>
063		?
064		@
065		A
066		B
067		C
 .		.
 .		.
 .		.
089		Y
090		Z
091		[
092  		\
093		]
094		^
095		_
096		`
097		a
098		b
099		c
 .		.
 .		.
 .		.
121		y
122		z
123		{
124		|
125		}
126		~