Idea for string comparison aid

[dfeuer at techhouse dot brown dot edu (David Feuer)]

(w)strxfrm operate on whole strings.  This is of course the most general
say to do it, but is impractical for some purposes (in particular, it
limits string sorting algorithms to comparison-based ones, or requires
them to store complete converted copies of strings).  I am wondering if
it would be possible to write one-piece-at-a-time versions of strxfrm
and wstrxfrm, much like mbrtowc.

I know that German has a letter that compares as two
's's, and that Spanish 'll' compares as 'l'.  These would be easy to
handle in this scheme.  Are there languages with more complex collation
rules that would break things?

David Feuer