At first sight, the range from ‘abc’ to ’def’ might not look much. In fact, this defines a range of no less than 2,110 values! They are ordered like this: ‘abc’, ‘abd’, ‘abe’ and so on until the end of the ‘a’s; then we start on the ‘b’s: ‘baa’, ‘bab’, ‘bac’ and so on. Suffice to say that ranges of this sort are probably rather a rare requirement and are best used with extreme caution or not at all.