Ruud H.G. van Tol wrote:
sort: to allot, assign; to separate into lots or classes;
to group, classify; to pick out; to select; to set in accord;
to adjust, put to rights.
Unfortunately, "to sort mail" has two distinct meanings, and the matter
has been discussed in this group before. It could mean arranging
messages in alphabetic, chronological, or numeric sequence by some key;
or it could mean separating messages into folders. One time I asked a
poster which way he was using it, and he replied that his having said
"sort by date" made it obvious; well, no, it doesn't, and his response
was not an answer. "To sort by date" could mean to put the oldest
messages first (and let's not get started on how to determine the age of
a message -- that's another nightmare), or to put the newest ones first,
or to move each month's or week's or day's or hour's messages into a
special folder for that period of time (and again, it's another arguable
point to determine how to assign a time to a message).
I've tried to tell people that we should use "to sequence mail" or "to
throw mail" (the term the USPS uses for placing mail into appropriate
bins or cubbyholes) to provide the needed distinction, but nobody
listens, and one time when I said "throw the messages" a certain
compatriot of Ruud's made up my mind for me that it was a typo for
"throw the messages away" and lit into me that I was advising the person
who had asked the question to discard mail that he clearly wanted to
keep ... even though my suggested code did not discard the messages.
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