Unfortunately, it's not so simple, especially once you go beyond the ASCII. Dylan Beattie has this brilliant talk [1] where he points out how even the "systems"

Unfortunately, it's not so simple, especially once you go beyond the ASCII. Dylan Beattie has this brilliant talk [1] where he points out how even the "systems" in human language involve a pile of quirks rather than any simple clean rules, and many of those rules are conflicting and the appropriate order of precedence depends on the context. Eg: the correct sorting order for the same sets of strings might even depend on the geography in which the question is asked! If you haven't had to deal with it previously, you'd be flabbergasted at how many foot-guns there are in such a simple question as alphabetical sorting, even without involving numeric components in strings. [1] There's no such thing as plain text https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfb5LSbQVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfb5LSbQVM