Boltzman Oscillation said:
Hmm well you said that you were putting all the letters first then the punctuation and then the blanks. In that case then I would split the total criteria into three parts, letters, punctuation, and blanks. The criterias are ordered since you HAVE to have letters, punctuation and then blanks. I would then split each criteria into smaller criteria, one for each letter or mark. Am i doing this right?
First of all, "criteria" is plural and its singular is "criterion", one criterion many criteria.
Secondly, I do not believe that the criteria themselves can be ordered. Criteria are just rules. There can be a hierarchy of such rules for conditional ordering. For example, a list of people may be ordered alphabetically by last name; if there are many with the same last name, within that sub-list there may be ordering by first name, then if more than one with the same last and first name order by middle initial, then by email address, etc.
Thirdly, yes you have to have letters and the rest of the stuff. Note that there are additional implicit ordering criteria in my text that you did not mention:
1. All like letters belong together.
2. Capitalized letters are treated the same as lower case letters but there must be a criterion deciding where they go within their group
1.
3. The succession of groups of like letters follows the succession of the letters in the English alphabet. Note: On the basis of what criteria was the English alphabet "ordered" anyway?
My point in posting all this is that if you wish to address the issue,
Boltzman Oscillation said:
Ive been struggling on determining whether something is ordered or unordered.
you will first have to choose your criteria of ordering and be aware of all of them. Specifying the criteria is equivalent to specifying what matters to you.
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1 To order the text, I imported it in an Excel sheet and parsed out the words into individual rows. Then I parsed the ASCII characters in each word into individual columns. The total number of such columns matched the length of the longest word (=11 in "punctuation"). Then, starting with column 1, I copied and pasted the 11 columns into a single column. Then I alphabetized the contents of that single column. Then I cut and pasted the punctuation marks from the top to the bottom because I wanted them to be there. Finally, I copied and pasted the transpose of the single column to a row which I then pasted into the post. I am mentioning all this because the placement of the capital letters within a group of like letters is implicit in the reordering procedure that I used; there was no randomness involved. Therefore, criteria were used in deciding where the capital letters went. Does the fact that I don't know what those criteria are mean that the ordering of the capital letters "does not matter"? Does the fact that the criteria for ordering the capital letters exist and can be deduced from the process I used mean that the ordering of the capital letters "does matter"? I guess what "matters" is what I care to know about.
