ls -la sort order

[Lee <ler762@gmail.com>]

I really don't like that 'ls -la' seems to ignore a leading dot when
sorting files for display - eg. in terminal I'll get
  old
  Pictures
  .profile
  Public

I haven't changed any settings yet; I've still got LANG=en_US.utf8

I can fix the problem by aliasing ls to 'LC_COLLATE=C  ls' but that
seems klunky and would only fix ls (and not break anything else).  How
bad of an idea would it be to set
  LC_COLLATE=C
in my .bashrc or is there some other setting to get dot files listed
first, then uppercase, then lowercase?


and I thought character codes 32-126 were the same thing in ascii and
utf8, so why is this happening in the first place?

Thanks,
Lee