Reference list sorting problem

[David Middleton]

Dear Jeff and lout people

I have discovered what appears to be a bug in lout's reference list sorting.
I'm using v3.08 but, looking back, it looks like 3.06 worked the same way.
Actually there are two problems - I know how to fix the first, but the
second is annoying:

i) If I have set 

        @RefListSortKey { @Author }

but cite several different references with the same @Author then only one
of these references appears in the reference list.

The solution to this is to make sure the fields in @RefListSortKey generate
a unique entry for each reference, e.g.

        @RefListSortKey { @Author, @Year, @Tag  }

i.e. it appears that the process lout uses to eliminate duplicate references
from the list is working on the SortKey.

ii) A more annoying problem is that the @Author fields do not actually
seem to be sorting correctly into alphabetical order.  I have a document
with the following six references (non-sorting tags omitted):

A  @Tag { gage1993deepsea }
   @Author { Gage, J.D. "&" May, R.M. }
   @Year { 1993 }

B  @Tag { gage1992tetracycline }
   @Author { Gage, J.D.}
   @Year { 1992a }

C  @Tag { gage1992growthbands }
   @Author { Gage, J.D.}
   @Year { 1992b }

D  @Tag { gage1985affinis }
   @Author { Gage, J.D. "&" Tyler, P.A. }
   @Year { 1985 }

E  @Tag { gage1991deepseabiol }
   @Author { Gage, J.D. "&" Tyler, P.A. }
   @Year { 1991 }

F  @Tag { gage1986echinus }
   @Author { Gage, J.D., Tyler, P.A. "&" Nichols, D.}
   @Year { 1986 }


In the reference list produced by lout, using the @RefListSortKey above,
they appear in the order A D E B C F whereas the order they "should" appear
in is  B C A D E F.

Is this really a bug?  Is there any way to fix it other than changing my
@Tags to get the order I need, and just sorting on those ?

David