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?

Because it wasn't clear to me from the documentation what sort of  
"problematic" behaviors were covered as documented differences vs  
unexpected behavior. Other OSS projects I have been involved with have  
a "when in doubt, file a bug" policy. If that isn't the case with R, I  
won't do so in the future.

Thank you for the pointer towards ICU. RHEL has some of the ICU  
libraries, but the icuSetCollate function returns a warning that R was  
not built with them. Including a reference to this function in the  
"See Also" for Comparison would make this info a little easier to find.

Thanks for your time,
Jeff
On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, jeffreys at rand.org wrote:

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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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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Jeffrey Sullivan
Senior Project Associate
RAND Corporation

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

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