We haven't solved much, if anything, but maybe it's time to put this one to bed. (In my mind, we (or I) have concluded that Collections work just fine so long as we honor some rules about Unicode.)

It would be nice to completely sort out how Collections work, but I don't think it's happening.

I still have no clue how a hash table is going to help us, unless there is a sorted array somewhere.

I could possibly see yet another set of doubly-linked pointers somewhere in that additional 60 bytes. The array itself doesn't need to be sorted, so long as we've got some way to traverse it in a sorted fashion. And pointers can certainly accomplish that. It rules out binary searches, but it doesn't rule out a hash table. Also, we need to recognize that the sorting has to be based on the actual hash-codes and not the actual keys.

I'm still far from convinced that hash-codes and hash-tables have anything to do with these things.

Regards,
Elroy