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When character data is sorted in English-speaking countries, the sort sequence is usually based on the numeric values of the characters defined by the code page. This kind of sorting is known as binary collation. The approach is reasonable for English because most code pages define English letters in a neat, ascending numeric order.

However, binary sorting is not reasonable for other languages, because most code pages assign higher, fairly arbitrary values for their special characters (that is, the characters occur out of sequence with the standard ASCII characters among which they must be sorted). For similar reasons, uppercasing can be based on binary values for English, but not for other languages. To provide support for country-, code page-, and language-specific sorting and uppercasing rules, BDE uses information stored in language drivers.