Collation implementation

[Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan]

[Snip]

|Matt Austern has defined a C API to locale data which he uses in the
|SGI implementation of locales. I'm using the same interface in my

[Snip]

|the right way is to base the standard C library on the standard C++
|library and not vice versa (yes, I know that this also causes problems

How about a third idea of using the excellent ICU 
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/
to do this? Please see my original post on this also.

Since IMHO it solves both problems of not depending on any particular
vendors locale implementation and yet get around problems with the
default C based implementation on some platforms. Of course this might
break things if someone sets the C lib based locale environment
variables. But then why use that if it has problems in the first place?
Or maybe even the C library could use ICU? 

The biggest I see for xplat locales is xplat locale data/file formats.
ICU solves this quite a bit so why not use it? Or am I missing some-
thing very obvious here?
Thanks,
Shiv