Collation implementation

[Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan]

|Isn't that also a C++ library, with the problem that it does not honor
|the system information on locales?

Yes it is a C++ library. But they do provide C bindings. Thats
irrelevent though. What I mainly meant that it has a very good locale
data system and that can be used. Since its open source I guess one
can always rip out the relevent parts and use them. Now if you look
at it as a system locale facility then I guess it doesn't matter what
language it is written in as long as it suffices for the purpose. Which
I think it does. I'm sure Nathan and others with a lot more experience
in these matters agree with me. You see unlike the other I18N libs
that are floating around this is the only one that has a complete
back end locale support without depending an iota on the system
facilities and has support for more locales/countries/languages than
most of the commercial OS'es with the exception of maybe win2k. And
a large base of volunteers seem to keep adding locale data to it for the
missing langs/countries.

|part is to make the system's C library and the C++ library agree on
|locale settings and information.

I think one can work around that with a hack by detecting the system
locale names and making relevent changes to the ICU locales. Somewhat
like what Paolo was referring to for with system locales on win32.
It would be very unfortunate if this library is overlooked and the
attendant "reinveting the wheel" takes place as a result. Right now
there is nothing available for the comprehensive level of locale and
I18N support available in ICU. Which commercial *NIX for example
supports more than a couple of dozen locales? Which of those in turn
support complex text and layout like Arabic? Which of them support
bi-directtional text? I18N is much more complex than people think and
IBM did a very admirable thing in releasing ICU. It was orginally
developed by Taligent and IMHO quite a bit of effort and thought went
into it. Please do read a bit about I18N and take a look at ICU before
anything else. And if ppl still want to ignore it then may I ask what
other option do we really have that does all that?
Thanks,
Shiv