sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)

As the help says

      The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating
      sequence of the locale in use: see ?Comparison?.

and that ref says

      Collation of
      non-letters (spaces, punctuation signs, hyphens, fractions and so
      on) is even more problematic.

That different OSes use the same name for a locale does not make them 
the same locale.

Note that R can be compiled to use ICU, which provides a 
well-considered collation suite.  R on Mac OS X uses ICU, as does a 
Linux build if it is available -- so I would say that it is RHEL that 
is out of line here (it makes little sense to have < and > far apart 
in the collation sequence).

Why did you report a documented difference as a bug?

Full_Name: Jeffrey Sullivan
Version: 2.10
OS: Mac
Submission from: (NULL) (130.154.0.250)


Sort produces different results when sorting strings with non-alphanumeric
characters, depending on the operating system:

RHEL 5.2, R 2.10.0
-------------

v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")

[1] "en_US.UTF-8"

sort(v)

[1] "<0" "1"  "2"  ">3"

Max OS 10.5.8, R 2.10.1
-------------------

v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")

[1] "en_US.UTF-8"

sort(v)

[1] "<0" ">3" "1"  "2"

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