[Dixielandjazz] Discographical punctuation

[andy.ling at quantel.com]

> From: Dick Baker <djml at dickbaker.org>

> Colleagues,
> 
> In discussing evolution, we get confused because of the flexible 
> meaning of the word "theory": To laymen it means "guess"; to 
> scientists it's a rigorous system for testing and proving or 
> disproving hypotheses.
> 
> Likewise, "index."  If you're talking about forcing a mindless 
> computer to place words in good alphabetical order based on its rigid 
> rules, then you may indeed want to remove all puncuation marks (or 
> even spaces between words) to get the job done.  For some purposes, 
> that's all you want.
> 

As ever things move on. Computers are now perfectly capable of
sorting and ordering to some very complex rules that would
create a list like Dick describes.

But more importantly I think is that they are also capable
of some very clever searching. Just look at google. It copes
with all sorts of spelling mistakes. It understands that
12th and twelfth are the same and punctuation is no problem.

So given a list of accurate titles as printed on sheet music,
record labels or whatever, it should be possible to get a
computer to search it and find a short list that contains what
you want. Ordering the original list may not be necessary.

Of course as Dick points out, this isn't a five minute job.

Andy Ling