Re: [office] Proposal for Spreadsheets: New sort option "natural sort"

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 05 February 2007, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> I think we have some kind of conflicting requirements here: You either 
> want to be able to sort floating point numbers. You then need to 
> interpret the decimal delimiter. Or you want to be able to sort version 
> numbers. You then must not interpret the decimal delimiter.

Indeed.

I hadn't realized that difference, which means that any generic code that implements
"natural sorting" must take into account those two different requirements/algorithms.

> What about resolving this conflict by having two options (or three, if 
> the include the default character code based sorting) instead of one, 
> "natural-integer" and "natural-float", where the first one sorts only 
> integer values, while the 2nd one sorts floats?

Well, now that we identified two ways of doing natural sorting, we still need
to answer: are both ways useful in spreadsheets? I admit that I'm the one who
broadened the scope of the discussion, thinking about that code for filemanagers
we have, but if the spreadsheet authors say that from a spreadsheet point of view
we only need the natural-float mechanism, then that's fine with me. No point in
specifying things that are not useful.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).