It's certainly worth considering, but the answer depends on what you're doing with it. If your goal is to binary search over it for an exact string match, for e

It's certainly worth considering, but the answer depends on what you're doing with it. If your goal is to binary search over it for an exact string match, for example, the important thing is that your sorting and searching code are consistent. Might as well have both use the simpler/faster LC_ALL=C semantics.