Seriously. Where do Numerals go when leading off an entry in alphabetical order?
Sonic Stage ((Sony’s attempt at an Itunes Inerface)) had numbers before A.
Itunes has numbers after Z.
Any ideas?
The numbers do not belong in an alphabetical order. Alphabetical order means order of letters in the alphabet.
I personally would put them before letters, because the ASCII character set and the Unicode character set both have code points for numbers that are smaller than the code points for letters.
Generally numbers go before letters and punctuation goes before numbers. Most of the time I see " " (space) as first. There are multiple systems, with people arguing over whether or not to alphabetize using spaces or to ignore spaces all together. There is no one single right answer, as long as the system is internally consistant.
I understand the phrase implies an Alphabet. It was simply becuase the numbers were obviously tossed in on top of an existing Alphabetical Order format, that the question was rasied. How else to ask, other than to include ‘alphabetical order’ ?
The word collation would be the proper term. Collation - Wikipedia
I’d call it alphanumeric sorting.
In library catalogues, back when they were on 3 inch by 5 inch cards, numbers used to file as full words in the language of the title. So, for example, the film “8 1/2” was filed as “Otto e mezzo” because the title is in Italian, just as the movie itself is! (And because I was responsible for filing in a card catalogue, I once spent a long time finding out what a particular number was in Croatian). But year numbers cause problems: is the movie title “1941” filed as “Nineteen forty one” or “One thousand nine hundred forty one”?
A combination of computerisation and common sense now prevail, fo numbers now file before letters, and file character by character, in the now computerised catalogues. (And bacxk many years ago I took the decision to refile a card catalogue with those rules – and spent a fairly long time going through the number names in many languages identifying the cards to refile: I’m not sure if I ever found that Croatian title again, though).
As long as you’re consistent, they could go before all letters, or they could go as they would go if the numeral were spelled out. The video store has all numeric titles at the beginning of the display, in numeric order within that area. At home I have them sorted as if spelled out. But be consistent.
Note that this is a fairly recent development (within the last couple versions) and Apple still files numbers at the beginning in the filesystem (don’t know about Leopard though). I’ve never seen numbers at the end anywhere else that I recall.
It varies by computer system however.
In Microsoft apps it puts numbers ahead of letters, but on some systems, like the IBM AS400 or ISeries it puts letters ahead of numbers.
This is usually the difference between the older EBCDIC character set versus the ASCII set.
The hex code for 0 in EBCDIC is F0 and 9 is F9. A is C1, Z is E9.
Jim