On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 09:20:14AM +0000, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> 1) collation is sorting order, not toupper/lower mappings, so I don't
>    understand how strcasecmp is related

(strcasecmp just like strcmp, for the sake of it)
Because it defines a (partial) order function, not just a test for
equivalence. Traditional English sorting doesn't apply e.g. to
German (e.g. the o umlaut in my name needs to be sorted like o).
To make it even more complicated, you can't just convert the string
to all lower case or all upper case and use strcmp, because the
tolower / toupper mapping might not be symmetrical. Think of the
German Esszet, which is a lower case character without upper case
equivalent (other than the substitution 'ss').

Never the less, since it is a (partial) order function, it can be
represented as table or set of tables.

Joerg