The intent is to only make changes where the result is clearer, and to
catch enough cases that the next time someone does something similar,
they will have seen the new, clearer way to write the thing they intend.

NOTE(rsc): This function does NOT call the runtime cmpstring function,
because we do not want to provide any performance justification for
using strings.Compare. Basically no one should use strings.Compare.

Need to do a little gitting around for the memory optimzation reversion.