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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
Date: Sat, 25 May 2024 16:17:02 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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"Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:
>Anton Ertl wrote:
>
>> "Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:
[...]
>> So the question is what locale the posters in this newsgroup use.  I
>> typically use the C.utf8 locale, because then ls sorts directories as
>> Thompson intended, but which does not show thousands separator.  If I
>> want to show thousands separators, I usually do it with
>> 
>> LC_NUMERIC=prog <command>
>> 
>> or (on machines where I have not installed the prog locale):
>> 
>> LC_NUMERIC=en_US <command>
>> 
>> Let's see how that works for some programs:
>> 
>> [c8:~:105615] LC_NUMERIC=prog perf stat true
>> 
>>  Performance counter stats for 'true':
>> 
>>               0.17 msec task-clock                #    0.376 CPUs
>> utilized                  0      context-switches          #    0.000
>> K/sec                  0      cpu-migrations            #    0.000
>> K/sec                 42      page-faults               #    0.242
>> M/sec            470_561      cycles                    #    2.716 GHz
>>              5_214      stalled-cycles-frontend   #    1.11% frontend
>> cycles idle             28_375      stalled-cycles-backend    #
>> 6.03% backend cycles idle            515_987      instructions
>> #    1.10  insn per cycle
>> #    0.05  stalled cycles per insn            103_096      branches
>> #  595.157 M/sec              4_973      branch-misses             #
>> 4.82% of all branches
>> 
>>        0.000460708 seconds time elapsed
>> 
>>        0.000522000 seconds user
>>        0.000000000 seconds sys
>
>
>I would be happier with that (using an underscore for the thousands
>separator) than with no separation.

The underscore is due to my "prog" locale
<https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/locale-prog/>.  If you use
LC_NUMERIC=en_US, you get "," as thousands separator; if you use,
e.g., LC_NUMERIC=de_AT, you get ".".  If you use LC_NUMERIC=C, you get
nothing.  All assuming you have these locales installed.

>> > I vaguely remember that in COBOL (which was defined before
>> > locale were a thing), if you specified "Decimal is Comma" (I may
>> > have the syntax wrong), then the decimal speparator became the
>> > comma.
>> 
>> In the source code? 
>
>
>I had tolook this up, as it has been far to long, but yes.
>
>https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.3?topic=section-decimal-point-is-comma-clause

Interesting.  Can be seen as another unneeded feature that later
programming languages did not include.

>No, if you wanted to use this, you added the "Decimal point is comma"
>statement in the configuration section.  Note that this is obsolete, as
>COBOL now supports some version of locales.

But that's a different feature: decimal-point-is-comma is for the
source code, while the locale is for the input and output of the
resulting program.  If you compile a C program with LC_NUMERIC=de_AT,
the decimal separator in the C code is still ".", not what comes from
the locale.  But if you then run a printf or scanf with the "'" in the
conversion specifier (and you are on a Unix system), you get the
output according to the locale, and the input is scanned according to
the locale.

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>