Implementing an Alternative Collation Sequence for Unicode® characters

By default, GT.M sorts string subscripts in the default order of the Unicode® UTF-8 numeric code-point values. Since this implied ordering may or may not be linguistically or culturally correct for a specific application, an implementation of an algorithm such as the Unicode® Collation Algorithm (UCA) may be required. Note that implementation of collation in GT.M requires the implementation of two functions, f(x) and g(y). f(x) transforms each input sequence of bytes into an alternative sequence of bytes for storage. Within the GT.M database engine, M nodes are retrieved according to the byte order in which they are stored. For each y that can be generated by f(x), g(y) is an inverse function that provides the original sequence of bytes; in other words, g(f(x)) must be equal to x for all x that the application processes. For example, for the People's Republic of China, it may be appropriate to convert from UTF-8 to Guojia Biaozhun (国家标准), the GB18030 standard, for example, using the libiconv library. The following requirements are important: