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Re: Question on title and explanation of shuffles -- letter/alphabet



Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Justin B Rye wrote:
>> -<listitem><para>The strings are compared from the head to the tail.</para></listitem>
>> -<listitem><para>Alphabets are larger than numbers.</para></listitem>
>> -<listitem><para>Numbers are compared as the integer.</para></listitem>
>> -<listitem><para>Alphabets are compared in the ASCII code order.</para></listitem>
>> -<listitem><para>There are some special rules for periods (<literal>.</literal>), plus (<literal>+</literal>) and tildes (<literal>~</literal>) as the followings.</para>
>> +<listitem><para>Strings are compared from the head to the tail.</para></listitem>
>> +<listitem><para>Letters are larger than digits.</para></listitem>
>> +<listitem><para>Numbers are compared as integers.</para></listitem>
>> +<listitem><para>Letters are compared in ASCII code order.</para></listitem>
>> +<listitem><para>There are special rules for period
>> +(<literal>.</literal>), plus (<literal>+</literal>), and tilde
>> +(<literal>~</literal>) characters, as follows.</para>
> 
> I did not realize you changed from /Alphabets/ to /Letters/.
> (In Japanese translation, "English letters" will be used here.)
> 
> This is good since we have "lower case letters" elsewhere.
> 
> I used "alphabet" since we had alphanumerics elsewhere. I was not sure letters
> include period etc.  I also thought, alphabets usualy are exclusive to [a-ZA-Z].

"Alphabets" never means individual characters (or at least, not in
native-speaker English).  "ABC...Z" and "АБВ...Я" are alphabets; "A"
is a letter.

Punctuation marks don't count as letters or as alphanumerics, but
readers unfamiliar with the term "alphanumeric" might not realise this.

> I am wondering if I should make this tutorial easier and consistent by removing
> 2 usages of "alphanumerics" along with your proposed change.
> 
> |-  at least two characters long, must start with an alphanumeric character, and
> |+  at least two characters long, must start with an letter or number character, and

That's clearer, but there's no need for "character" (also, s/an/a/):

      at least two characters long, must start with a letter or number, and
> 
> |-  alphanumerics (<literal>0-9A-Za-z</literal>), plus (<literal>+</literal>),
> |+  letters (<literal>A-Za-z</literal>), numbers (<literal>0-9</literal>), plus (<literal>+</literal>),

Yes, that's okay.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package


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