[outdated] strcmp, or a proper operator < on strings
 

Operator < on strings in ESO-Lua ignores everything except letters and digits. It's useless for sorting strings containing spaces and/or punctuation, as it doesn't define a total order.

Examples:

I assume the sorting is based on type, then the order with base 36 as next
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, if they are equal then sorting is based on case ?

comparing other values would likely produce a nil value as it can't convert it to a number for comaprison, which leads to a nil, which leads to type inequality, which leads to false, if it all makes sense somehow
"a head" < "ahead" == false --> nil < 17607829
"ahead" < "a head" == false --> 17607829 < nil

Anyways, it looks weird :P
aa == 370 -> (36^1)*10 + (36^0)*10
aaa == 13330 -> (36^2)*10 + aa
and so on ...

The default operator < in Lua requires that both operands are of the same type:
http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/lvm.c.html#luaV_lessthan

Strings are compared using strcoll:
http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/lvm.c.html#l_strcmp

What we have in ESO is some custom-made string comparison. Perhaps it supports multi-byte UTF-8 characters, I haven't checked that. It doesn't support ASCII punctuation, that's broken enough in my eyes ;)