--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote: > Does anyone
have a clue about the roots of

> alphabetic order? It seems remarkably stable for
> something that seems so arbitrary.

I think it's Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer
Programming", Volume 3, Sorting and Searching; where
I just read a very good non-technical history of it.

Andrew Dunbar.

> --
> John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> "One time I called in to the central system and
> started working on a big
> thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing
> script. One of the geologists
> came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that
> happens to me too.
> Try hanging up and phoning in again.'" --Beverly
> Erlebacher
>
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