>>34
At least in Python and Ruby, you can redefine the comparison operator for any object, strings included. Whatever you put in there affects all sorting operations. So you can put thorn wherever you want.

And in Perl, I've had to get UTF-8 straight in order to process database output. I had to convert certain columns to uppercase. And we have another app where the character-length (as opposed to byte-length) of strings is very important.

And I just dabble in internationalization, really. For all I know, there are more elegant solutions than the one I used. And you might ultimately be right; in some cases, you don't care about the encoding, you're just shunting bits to and fro. I, for one, want to make sure my app always knows what kind of data it's dealing with.