Re: Human-readable file sorting

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> Then we should have a global variable that specifies which function
> to use to compare file names.  Its value could be 'string-lessp' or
> 'string-natural-lessp' or something else.  Its name could be
> 'file-name-comparison-function'.
>
> Then we want some user interface to make it easy to choose one of
> those two functions as the value of 'file-name-comparison-function'.

Yes, I agree.  But Eli pointed out (I think :-)) that this setting may
actually be something that will (or should) affect more than file name
sorting.

I think that may be a good idea, but I'm not sure.  This is a problem
that mostly rears its head when dealing with file names, which very
commonly use embedded numbers.  I can't (off the top of my head)
remember other situations where you get a list of strings that may have
embedded numbers, and you want to have them sorted and displayed?

If somebody had examples where that happens, I think we should go for a
non-file-specific setting.  Otherwise, we should do this setting for
file names only.

-- 
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   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no