On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 14:02, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
This doesn't make any sense.
Well when the High Court of Australia considered it they said it was unsatisfactory, which is their way of saying "it sucks, but that's the way it is."
It means that we can _never_ have correct behaviour, no matter what we do, even if we magically come up with the same table. This is insane.
In some cases it amounts to that. This is why it's important to try to come up with some way of expressing the contents of the table without the table, or of finding objective rules that can generate the table.
Having compared a few versions of the allkeys database it seems that there have been some changes to the ordering of characters between versions, which leads me to wonder if Microsoft were just using an earlier version of the table. Microsoft's documentation suggests they adhere to version 2.0 of the Unicode standard, whereas the allkeys.txt file immediately accessible on the unicode.org web site is version 3.1.1.
Here's the versions I can find:
2.1.9d8 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/basekeys.txt 2.1.9d8 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/compkeys.txt 3.1.1 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/allkeys-3.1.1.txt 3.1.1d3 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/allkeys-3.1.1d3.txt 3.0.0d5 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/allkeys-4.0.0d5.txt
The 2.1.9d8 file seems after a quick look to be closer to the Crossover version of the table - for example, it has many of the different types of space characters sorted near 0020, which is an aspect of the Crossover table not present in the table based on allkeys.txt (3.1.1), so the theory that Microsoft's results are just based on an earlier version of the standard table is starting to look like it has merit.