[R] sort() depends on locale

[Marius Hofert]

Hi,

If I use invisible(Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")) in ~/.Rprofile, then

> sort(c("L.Y", "Lu", "L.Q"))
[1] "L.Q" "L.Y" "Lu"

whereas using invisible(Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "en_US.UTF-8")) results in

> sort(c("L.Y", "Lu", "L.Q"))
[1] "L.Q" "Lu"  "L.Y"

I know this issue has appeared already
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help//2012-February/304089.html), I
just don't see a reason for the second output: either '.' comes before
letters, then the result should be
"L.Q" "L.Y" "Lu" or it comes afterwards, then it should be "Lu" "L.Q"
"L.Y" -- the above result thus seems inconsistent to any useful notion
of 'sort' (?)

Cheers,

Marius