To: Richard Damon From: Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org>:
> On 6/23/18 9:05 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >> Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org>: >> >>> On 6/23/18 8:03 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >>>> I always know my locale. The locale is tied to the human user. >>> No, it should be tied to the data you are processing. >> In computing, a locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's >> language, region and any special variant preferences that the user >> wants to see in their user interface. >> >> <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale_(computer_software)> >> >> The data should not depend on the locale. > So no one foreign ever gives you data? Never in my decades in computer programming have I found any use for locales. In particular, they have never helped me decode "foreign" data, whether in ASCII, Latin-1, Latin-3, Latin-9, JIS or UTF-8. > Note, that wikipedia article is focused on the SYSTEM locale, which > yes, that should reflect the what the user wants in his interface. I don't think locales have anything to do with anything else. >>> If an English user is feeding a program Chinese documents, while >>> processing those documents the program should be using the >>> appropriate Chinese Locale. >> Not true. > How else is the program going to understand the Chinese data? If someone gives me a file, they had better indicate the file format. > The fact that locale issues leak into data is the reason that the > single immutable global locale doesn't work. Locales don't work. Period. > You really want to imbue into data streams what locale their data > represents (and use that in some of the later processing of data from > that stream). Can you refer to a standard for that kind of imbuement? Of course, you have document types, schema definitions and other implicit and explicit format indicators. You shouldn't call them locales, though. >>> Data presented to the user should normally use his locale (unless he >>> has specified something different). >> Ok. Here's a value for you: >> >> 100ΓΘ¼ >> >> I see '1', '0', '0', 'ΓΘ¼'. What do you see in your locale (LC_MONETARY)? > If I processed that on my system I would either get $100, or an error of > wrong currency symbol depending on the error checking. Don't forget to convert the amount as well... >> The single global is due to what the locale was introduced for. It >> came about around the time when Unix applications were being made >> "8-bit clean." Along with UCS-2 and XML, it's one of those things you >> wish you'd never have to deal with. > > Locale predates UCS-2, it was the early attempt to provide > internationalization to C code so even programmers who didn't think > about it could add the line setlocale(LC_ALL, "") and make their code > work at least mostly right in more places. A single global was quick > and simple, and since threads didn't exist, not an issue. > > In many ways it was the first attempt that should have been thrown > away, but got too intertwined. C++ made a significant improvement to > it by having streams remember their own locale. Noone should breathe any new life into locales. And yes, add C++ to the list of things you wish you'd never have to deal with... Marko --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3 * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
