Falsehoods programmers believe about names: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...]
There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)
There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)
No, believing there's an authoritative list is one of the falsehoods programmers believe about falsehoods programmers believe about names.
“Falsehoods programmers believe about authoritative lists”
And the answer is: if at all possible, only use a name for display purposes. Use a username, a UUID, or some other appropriate unique identifier that you can control the semantics of for absolutely anything for which you might need to assume any property whatsoever.
If you can avoid having a name, don’t even try to collect one. If you need one, it should be a single freeform text input accepting an arbitrary-length and arbitrary-content UTF-8 string. Persist that string exactly as you receive it. Perform no operation on that string other than rendering it.
That isn’t perfect but it’s as close as any of us can reasonably get as things stand today.
That, unfortunately, isn't always possible. Sorting a list of people by their names alphabetically is a fairly reasonable thing to ask and in many places, it is expected that names will be sorted the surname, whether or not it appears first. This by itself requires breaking rules 18 and 20, but we may not be able to opt not to do it.
The hard problem is not what to do in the ideal case: the hard problem is figuring out how to handle names in a way that minimizes friction if requirements force us to make some such assumptions.
Say you have the last-names 佐藤 (SATO) and 中村 (NAKAMURA). In Japanese, collation is based on the kana sounds, so 佐藤 -> さ (SA) and 中村 -> な (NA). But the 五十音 (gojuon) ordering of the kana has さ before な, so 佐藤 should be before 中村.
Good luck attempting to do a culturally-neutral ordering of 佐藤, 中村, SALMON and NABARRO - someone is going to be confused.
Or I’m missing something about formatting. French last names are always written UPPERCASE it appears. Funny side-effect is that if a French company takes over a Dutch company, after the integration, all last names of the Dutch are also in uppercase.