You’re talking about sort keys, no? That allows you to deal with collation in a higher layer (which generates the sort keys per desired collation), but delegate

You’re talking about sort keys, no? That allows you to deal with collation in a higher layer (which generates the sort keys per desired collation), but delegate the actual sorting to a dumb lower layer (i.e., memcmp). (Just because I can’t resist, I’ll mention that sort keys are a perfect application for Hu-Tucker codes: https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/49586 https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/49586).