On 17/04/2024 18:30, Stefan Ram wrote:
> ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>> In the TeXbook, it's "#" first, then "$", and finally "!". "\#"
>> gets slotted in between "#" and "##". Those special characters
>> are listed before the regular ol' letters in the index.
>
> Yup, it seems like Donald Knuth is using the ASCII order for the index
> of his books, but the combo "\#" is basically "semantically" sorted in
> with the "#" character. It's like they're homies or something.
>
> But where does this character order in the ASCII code even come from?
>
> To make it easier to use with programming languages, all the graphic
> characters in the ASCII code from '63 had to be in one contiguous
> code range, but this range had to be in the middle, since the outer
> code blocks already had the two control characters NUL and DEL.

Yes, and ASCII had some nice ideas. For example, it put the 'space'
character between the control characters and the printable characters so
that it could be taken as either as required by the context.

>
> They also made it easier to manufacture keyboards by making sure
> characters that usually appear together on a key only differ by one
> bit. Plus, it made it simpler to pick useful 4-bit sub-ranges - like
> a 4-bit sub-range that has the digits and the basic math operators.

Before I checked I had a vague idea that ASCII began with the
punctuation on the top row of some keyboards starting ! " # $ % but
after that the correspondence does not seem to be held.

--
James Harris

On 17/04/2024 20:46, jerryfriedman wrote:
> Stefan Ram wrote:
>
>> ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>>> That's a dope question, fo' sho'!
>
>>   "Dope question" meaning "excellent question" here as in
>>   the slang expression, not "dope" as in "a silly person"!
>
> Yes, that might inadvertently offended the OP.  Speaking of which,
> imitation is often used for mockery, and your imitations of non-
> standard dialects strike me as much more likely to offend people
> than, say, profanity is.

[OP] I didn't understand the reference but took no offence. The fo' and
sho' suggested humour rather than anything else.

--
James Harris

James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
>I already think some changes are needed and there will be other
>punctuation characters to add (I've only included the ASCII punctuation
>characters so far) but ISTM the principle of going from light to heavy
>is likely a good way to go.

You already done wrote that you're hip to the fact that the
weight (the blackness, if you will) of a letter depends on
the font you choose.

(The same principle is used by programs that turn photos
into ASCII art. They gotta have a table that tells 'em which
characters are lighter and which ones are darker.)

Otherwise, you could also use the meaning, but that depends on the
theme of the book, In some programming languages, for example, they
group the special characters, like "separators" and "operators."
So you could offer an "index of separators" and an "index of
operators," if you wanted to get real fancy-pants about it.

Now, the Chinese folks, they're always tryna figure out how
to organize all their characters in dictionaries. They use
bits and pieces of the characters ("radicals") themselves
to group 'em, or they count the individual strokes or use the
pronunciation. With so many symbols, they probably can't tell
the difference between the shades of black anymore . . .

On 18/04/2024 08:11, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> jerryfriedman wrote:
>
>> At least in English, unlike French, there's a nearly complete
>> consensus on the names of the numbers. But does _101 Dalmatians_
>> come before or after (*wikips*) the Korean TV series _100 Days
>> My Prince_?
>
> When alphabetizing titles and such I would ignore all non-letters.

Entries can be put in more than one place in an index. A string such as
*w* could be indexed under the literal *w* and as though it were written
without punctuation, i.e. under w.

>
> When alphabetizing technical characters I would put them all first and
> sort them in the easiest way - which means the way a computer would sort
> them without special algorithms.
>
> Kernigan&Ritchie have put all the technical characters first in the
> index. The principle for their internal sorting is not evident.

Good suggestion. I knew I'd seen an index of punctuation somewhere
before. That may have been it.

There is a copy of K&R1 online somewhere. I cannot find it so cannot
link to it but I have a paper copy of K&R2 so can comment on what it
does. And what it does is bizarre! For example, it begins with

0
0x
+
&
=
+=

Note the + sign separation. Other 'words' beginning with + appear in
other places further on.

--
James Harris

On 17/04/2024 22:45, Mark Brader wrote:
> James Harris:
>> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
>> list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
>> technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
>> begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
>> they appear in?
>
> The same issue arises in alphabetical lists of titles if the title
> begins with a symbol. I posted this example here in 2011:
>
> In 1989 Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams wrote a book that O'Reilly
> published under the title "!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail
> Addressing & Networks". Try deciding how you'd find *that* one
> in an alphabetical catalog!

Surely an index could include that at least under

!

and under

D

>
> For example, I tried the Library of Congress. When I copied the full
> title into their basic search form, it rejected it outright -- I had to
> delete the first two characters before it would find it. I then tried
> searching on just some keywords in the title. From the results I got,
> it appears that the library sorts this title after titles beginning
> with a digit and before titles beginning with a letter. But you could
> equally well imagine it being sorted as if it began with "Exclamation".
>
> (I also tried the Toronto Public Library; if I remember correctly,
> *they* used to have it sorted as if it began with the words "At sign".
> But I can't check on that, because they don't have a copy of it any more.)

ISTM a curious choice to take @ as the start of the name but I'd have no
objection to indexing it under @ as well.

--
James Harris

On 18 Apr 2024, jerryfriedman wrote

> Ross Clark wrote:
>
>> On 18/04/2024 4:17 a.m., James Harris wrote:
>>> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words
>>> and to list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted
>>> to index a technical book in which a reader may want to look up
>>> 'symbols' which begin with or are made up of punctuation
>>> characters? What order should they appear in?
>>>
>>> For example, should a symbol such as
>>>
>>>   %%
>>>
>>> come before of after a symbol such as
>>>
>>>   !=
>>>
>>> and where would
>>>
>>>   $
>>>
>>> fit in?
>>>
>>> I thought about following ASCII but it has its punctuation
>>> characters in an unintuitive order - for example, its single and
>>> double quotes are not adjacent and it has backslash in between
>>> opening and closing square brackets. Neither of those makes much
>>> sense to a human.
>>>
>>> Hence the query: does anyone know of a suitable standard or
>>> human-friendly ordering for punctuation symbols?
>>>
>
>> Don't these symbols have names? E.g. percent, exclamation,
>> dollar... That would seem to be a simple way of alphabetizing
>> them in an index. They wouldn't be all together, of course, but
>> why would you need that?
>
> I just learned that some authorities--the Chicago Manual of Style,
> at least--recommend alphabetizing isolated numbers that way. I
> don't remember ever noticing that.
>
> https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/CHIIndexingComplete.pdf
>
> At least in English, unlike French, there's a nearly complete
> consensus on the names of the numbers. But does _101 Dalmatians_
> come before or after (*wikips*) the Korean TV series _100 Days
> My Prince_?

I recall seeing a town-planning cartoon,[1] where an earnest new guy
listed the street names in alphabetical order:

Fifth
First
Fourth
Second
Third

[1]A bit niche, but yes, such things exist...

--
Cheers, Harvey

On 18/04/2024 12:15, Stefan Ram wrote:
> James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
>> I already think some changes are needed and there will be other
>> punctuation characters to add (I've only included the ASCII punctuation
>> characters so far) but ISTM the principle of going from light to heavy
>> is likely a good way to go.
>
> You already done wrote that you're hip to the fact that the
> weight (the blackness, if you will) of a letter depends on
> the font you choose.

To be clear, the sequence would have to be the same irrespective of how
the characters would appear in different typefaces. For example, if '%'
came before '#' then it would always do so even if '%' looked heavier
than '#' when printed in a specific font.

It's just that choosing an order which is guided by /typical/ weight
would likely help a reader remember the order.

>
> (The same principle is used by programs that turn photos
> into ASCII art. They gotta have a table that tells 'em which
> characters are lighter and which ones are darker.)
>
> Otherwise, you could also use the meaning, but that depends on the
> theme of the book, In some programming languages, for example, they
> group the special characters, like "separators" and "operators."
> So you could offer an "index of separators" and an "index of
> operators," if you wanted to get real fancy-pants about it.

Right. This would have to be independent of meaning.

For that matter, it would ideally be independent of the language of the
book. Governments can change the way they want words to be sorted but
hopefully that need not apply also to punctuation.

>
> Now, the Chinese folks, they're always tryna figure out how
> to organize all their characters in dictionaries. They use
> bits and pieces of the characters ("radicals") themselves
> to group 'em, or they count the individual strokes or use the
> pronunciation. With so many symbols, they probably can't tell
> the difference between the shades of black anymore . . .

Yes, different strokes....

--
James Harris

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 17:17:57 +0100: James Harris
<james.harris.1@gmail.com> scribeva:

>If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
>list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
>technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
>begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
>they appear in?
>
>For example, should a symbol such as
>
> %%
>
>come before of after a symbol such as
>
> !=
>
>and where would
>
> $
>
>fit in?
>
>I thought about following ASCII but it has its punctuation characters in
>an unintuitive order - for example, its single and double quotes are not
>adjacent and it has backslash in between opening and closing square
>brackets. Neither of those makes much sense to a human.
>
>Hence the query: does anyone know of a suitable standard or
>human-friendly ordering for punctuation symbols?

Use any natural language locale, or the C/POSIX locale which will put
everything in Unicode scalar order. That is, ASCII for the simple
things.
--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

James Harris:

> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
> list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
> technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
> begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
> they appear in?

One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index like so:

& {ampersand}
...
&= {ampersand, equals sign}
...
&# {ampersand, number sign}
...

Another option is an entirely separate list of symbols grouped
thematically. James McCawley's /The Syntactic Phenomena of English/
includes a list of "Special Symbols" divided into five groups (symbols
from formal logic, stress and intonation, symbols relating to
acceptability, etc.) with no more than about half a dozen symbols in
each group. Although there's no obvious order, the groups are small
enough that it's easy to find the symbol you're looking for.

--
John

On 2024-04-18 11:31:40 +0000, HVS said:
>
> I recall seeing a town-planning cartoon,[1] where an earnest new guy
> listed the street names in alphabetical order:
>
> Fifth
> First
> Fourth
> Second
> Third
>
> [1]A bit niche, but yes, such things exist...

Yes, but if you needed an entry for each street in an index, that's the
order you would use.

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

* Athel Cornish-Bowden <l8bs34F1u4iU1@mid.individual.net> :
Wrote on Thu, 18 Apr 2024 08:15:18 +0200:
> On 2024-04-18 01:43:10 +0000, Madhu said:
>> The common Lisp Hyperspec has a symbol index with a page for
>> non-alphabetic symbols
>> http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw80/CLHS/Front/X_Alph_9.htm
>> The symbols "&*+-/1<=>" happen to be placed in the order of the
>> ascii
>> character codes.
>> (loop for c across "&*+-/1<=>" collect (char-code c))
>> (38 42 43 45 47 49 60 61 62)
>
> Even if such an ordering exists, are readers of books supposed to
> study it before reading?

The authors of the CLHS probably just used standard sorting functions on
the strings, which resulted in the above order. this would probably be
the result of following Jerry's suggested, of using the sorting
functions of the word processor or editor at hand.

(Unless of course evil endtimes bankers have hired and rigged up
developers to do something weird and non-intuitive but nevertheless
backed their decisions with dollars and publically purchased narratives
to fulfil their endtimes agenda in, which case these bets are off)

Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:

> jerryfriedman wrote:

>> At least in English, unlike French, there's a nearly complete
>> consensus on the names of the numbers. But does _101 Dalmatians_
>> come before or after (*wikips*) the Korean TV series _100 Days
>> My Prince_?

> When alphabetizing titles and such I would ignore all non-letters.

So you'd put both of those under D? I don't think that's
recommended for English. And what would you do with _1984_, _1999_,
etc.?

> When alphabetizing technical characters I would put them all first and
> sort them in the easiest way - which means the way a computer would sort
> them without special algorithms.

--
Jerry Friedman

Silvano wrote:

> Garrett Wollman hat am 17.04.2024 um 23:43 geschrieben:
>> For someone
>> actually using the index, who probably just wants to find the meaning
>> of that '`' character, they may not know that backtick is inexplicably
>> called "GRAVE ACCENT" in the Unicode table.

> Inexplicably? How else do you call it?

That should be "What else do you call it?"

I'd call it a backwards apostrophe or a left single quote if I ever
had to refer to it. In some contexts I'd add "straight".

> I do not know about mathematicians, but the linguists who invented
> Unicode are trying to list there letters, ideograms and other symbols
> used in all known languages. And "`" has been called "accent grave" for
> centuries in French.

Only when it goes over a letter. Likewise the ^ is called a caret in
English, not a circumflex accent. On the other hand, many of us do
call the ~ a tilde (which I'm told isn't common terminology in Spanish).
(I'm not speaking for Garrett, who has already answered your question.)

--
Jerry Friedman

J. J. Lodder wrote:

> jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Stefan Ram wrote:
>>
>> > ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>> >>That's a dope question, fo' sho'!
>>
>> > "Dope question" meaning "excellent question" here as in
>> > the slang expression, not "dope" as in "a silly person"!
>>
>> Yes, that might inadvertently offended the OP. Speaking of which,
>> imitation is often used for mockery, and your imitations of non-
>> standard dialects strike me as much more likely to offend people
>> than, say, profanity is.

> Still, it would be a nice research project:
> translating for example Oxford English into American Redneck,
> and vica versa.

Vice-versa is more common--for instance, the subtitled "jive" in
the movie /Airplane/.

Pastor Trey Ferguson is creating the New Living Treyslation of the
Bible into AAVE.

https://www.pastortrey05.com/

I'm not coming up with examples in white rural dialects, but I'm
sure there are some.

> I guess it would be hard to get it just right,

Quite. For one thing, there's more than one rural American dialect.
For another, the typical rhetorical strategies differ, and a lot of
people will shift to more or less standard grammar and pronunciation
depend on subject matter, emotion, etc.

A few years ago my college brought in a speaker on diversity named
George Lee, a young (from my point of view) black man who spoke
mostly in AAVE. It was interesting to hear academic topics
discussed in that variety, but I thought he often lapsed into
more academic English.

https://www.theconsciouslee.com/

On the other hand, as I've mentioned, one of my Spanish teachers
told about the time he was in a courtroom in New Mexico and
translated the accused's pachuco Spanish into a more standard
Spanish.

--
Jerry Friedman

John Dunlop wrote:

> James Harris:

>> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
>> list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
>> technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
>> begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
>> they appear in?

> One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
> character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
> alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index like so:

> & {ampersand}
> ...
> &= {ampersand, equals sign}
> ...
> &# {ampersand, number sign}
> ...
...

OK, so "number sign", not "hash sign", "pounds sign", or "octothorpe".
What does it call the "."? And what about "(" and ")", etc.?

--
Jerry Friedman

jerryfriedman:
> John Dunlop wrote:

....
>> One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
>> character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
>> alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index like so:
>
>> & {ampersand}
>> ...
>> &= {ampersand, equals sign}
>> ...
>> &# {ampersand, number sign}
>> ...
> ..
>
> OK, so "number sign", not "hash sign", "pounds sign", or "octothorpe".
> What does it call the "."? And what about "(" and ")", etc.?

"Period" and "left/right parenthesis" (separate entries).

Other character names with common alternatives include "solidus" and
"left/right curly bracket" (not "brace"). The only one that stands out
to me is "low line" for "underscore".

--
John

John Dunlop <dunlop.john@ymail.com> wrote or quoted:
>"Period" and "left/right parenthesis" (separate entries).

The specifications for ASCII and Unicode don't just assign
a code number to each character, but also give them a name.

Here's a Python program I wrote, along with its output:

main.py

import unicodedata

for ch in( '&', '=', '#', '.', '(', ')', '/', '{', '}', '_' ):
print( f"{ch} - {unicodedata.name( ch )}" )

output

& - AMPERSAND
= - EQUALS SIGN
# - NUMBER SIGN
.. - FULL STOP
( - LEFT PARENTHESIS
) - RIGHT PARENTHESIS
/ - SOLIDUS
{ - LEFT CURLY BRACKET
} - RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
_ - LOW LINE

Gotta hand it to 'em - Python and Unicode are like the dynamic duo!
These two just work so damn well together, it's almost unfair.

On 18/04/2024 at 15:50, jerryfriedman wrote:
> John Dunlop wrote:
>
>> James Harris:
>
>>> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
>>> list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
>>> technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
>>> begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
>>> they appear in?
>
>> One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
>> character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
>> alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index
>> like so:
>
>> & {ampersand}
>> ...
>> &= {ampersand, equals sign}
>> ...
>> &# {ampersand, number sign}
>> ...
> ..
>
> OK, so "number sign", not "hash sign", "pounds sign", or "octothorpe".
> What does it call the "."? And what about "(" and ")", etc.?
>

Signs: Pound = £ not # (hash)
Equally, I don't think you need 'sign' in the description; after all
they're all signs aren't they?

--
Chris Elvidge, England
I WAS NOT TOUCHED "THERE" BY AN ANGEL

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>for ch in( '&', '=', '#', '.', '(', ')', '/', '{', '}', '_' ):

Yo dawg, I was overthinking that ish. All you gotta do is just write:

for ch in( '&=#.()/{}_' ):

, that's it, fam.

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>for ch in( '&=#.()/{}_' ):

for ch in '&=#.()/{}_'

jerryfriedman wrote:

>>> At least in English, unlike French, there's a nearly complete
>>> consensus on the names of the numbers. But does _101 Dalmatians_
>>> come before or after (*wikips*) the Korean TV series _100 Days
>>> My Prince_?
>
>> When alphabetizing titles and such I would ignore all non-letters.
>
> So you'd put both of those under D?

My mistake. I should have written "special characters". I would sort
numbers before letters. It was the underscore which I would ignore.

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark

"Silvano":
> > And "`" has been called "accent grave" for centuries in French.
Jerry Friedman:
> Only when it goes over a letter. Likewise the ^ is called a caret in
> English, not a circumflex accent.

Only when it goes below the baseline!
^ (like this)
--
Mark Brader | "As a professional, it's my job to take a slightly dim
Toronto | view of the ... people who will look at my code next.
msb@vex.net | If I am wrong... so much the better!" -- Henry Spencer

My text in this article is in the public domain.

Chris Elvidge:
> On 18/04/2024 at 15:50, jerryfriedman wrote:
>> John Dunlop wrote:

....
>>> One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
>>> character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
>>> alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index
>>> like so:
>>
>>> & {ampersand}
>>> ...
>>> &= {ampersand, equals sign}
>>> ...
>>> &# {ampersand, number sign}
>>> ...
>> ..
>>
>> OK, so "number sign", not "hash sign", "pounds sign", or "octothorpe".
>> What does it call the "."? And what about "(" and ")", etc.?
>>
>
> Signs: Pound = £ not # (hash)

AmE, innit.

> Equally, I don't think you need 'sign' in the description; after all
> they're all signs aren't they?

They are indeed all signs, but using "number" by itself might mislead
the reader into thinking "#" is a placeholder for a numeral. "Number
sign" avoids that ambiguity.

--
John

John Dunlop wrote:

> jerryfriedman:
>> John Dunlop wrote:

> ....
>>> One option is to order them alphabetically by the name of the first
>>> character and place them in a separate list immediately before the
>>> alphabetic list. For example, /The SGML Handbook/ begins its index like so:
>>
>>> & {ampersand}
>>> ...
>>> &= {ampersand, equals sign}
>>> ...
>>> &# {ampersand, number sign}
>>> ...
>> ..
>>
>> OK, so "number sign", not "hash sign", "pounds sign", or "octothorpe".
>> What does it call the "."? And what about "(" and ")", etc.?

> "Period" and "left/right parenthesis" (separate entries).

> Other character names with common alternatives include "solidus" and
> "left/right curly bracket" (not "brace").

Well, I don't mind if you don't. James Harris might object to separating
the left delimiters from the right delimiters.

> The only one that stands out
> to me is "low line" for "underscore".

Strange to me too.

--
Jerry Friedman

On 18-Apr-24 15:14, jerryfriedman wrote:
> J. J. Lodder wrote:
>
>> jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> Stefan Ram wrote:
>>>
>>> > ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>>> >>That's a dope question, fo' sho'!
>>>
>>> >   "Dope question" meaning "excellent question" here as in
>>> >   the slang expression, not "dope" as in "a silly person"!
>>>
>>> Yes, that might inadvertently offended the OP.  Speaking of which,
>>> imitation is often used for mockery, and your imitations of non-
>>> standard dialects strike me as much more likely to offend people
>>> than, say, profanity is.
>
>> Still, it would be a nice research project:
>> translating for example Oxford English into American Redneck,
>> and vica versa.
>
> Vice-versa is more common--for instance, the subtitled "jive" in
> the movie /Airplane/.
>
> Pastor Trey Ferguson is creating the New Living Treyslation of the
> Bible into AAVE.
>
> https://www.pastortrey05.com/

This reminded me of a (very) old Peter Cook & Dudley Moore sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za08oosFmpI

--
Sam Plusnet