stage-ordering

Stage ordering: the specific pattern runs first

Every stage is a set of greedy regexes over the whole text. There is no arbitration: whichever stage reaches a span of characters first claims it, and the stage that would have matched a longer, more specific span gets whatever debris is left. Debris is worse than no match at all, because it is usually still numeric and the numerals stage will happily read it as something.

Three bugs of exactly this shape have been fixed so far:

Winner took	Loser got	Symptom
decimals took 3.12	.1	Python 3.12.1 → три целых двенадцать сотых. Одного
years took 2021 года	15.03.	15.03.2021 года → пятнадцать целых три сотых. Две тысячи…
decimals took 5.2	10-	10-5.2 → десять пять целых две десятых (separator gone)

In each case the orphan's trailing dot became a sentence boundary in detokenize, and because NUMERAL_CONTEXT_BARRIERS does not include ., get_numeral_case scanned straight across it and inflected the stranded number to agree with words from the previous "sentence".

The rule

A full date is a special case of a year; a version is a special case of a decimal; a range is a special case of two numbers. The special case must run first. normalize_text therefore runs dates_time before years, and normalize_versions before normalize_decimals.

The same rule applies to authority, not just to span length: an explicit instruction outranks a guess. dictionary therefore runs before latinization — while it ran second it could not match any Latin token in TTS mode, because latinization had already rewritten the token into Cyrillic, so user rules were silently ignored in the pipeline's main mode.

Reordering is usually right, but never free

Putting the specific stage first is the correct fix, not a workaround. But a stage that has spent its whole life running second can carry latent defects that only the first position exposes. Reordering dates_time before years unmasked two of them at once: the shared year fragment consumed the whitespace before an optional era word (…двадцатого годаг.), and the dotted date pattern had no era tail at all.