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From: Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 21:33:15 +0200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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References: <2024May20.145316@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
 <memo.20240520144440.15496G@jgd.cix.co.uk>
 <2024May20.192403@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
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Anton Ertl wrote:
> jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:
>> In article <2024May20.145316@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
>> anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
>>
>>> I am not convinced that the locale-specific input is a good idea,
>>> though.
>>
>> You look pretty silly if your input function can't read the products of
>> your output function, and figuring out what separators have been used
>> automatically is not foolproof.
> 
> Yes and yes.  Especially given the "," vs. "." roles in various
> locales.
> 
> But OTOH, not being able to read or, worse, misinterpreting the output
> produced by someone else just because that output was produced under a
> different locale is pretty silly, too.
> 
> For reserved words and builtin names of programming languages, the
> solution has been to make them independent of the locale and ignore
> Algol 60 and Algol 68 for programming, which suggested something else.
> 
> We already do the same for the decimal separator in the usual output
> functions (it uses "."), we should introduce thousands separators that
> are also locale-independent.

Yeah, this is one of those misfeatures with no good solution. Hydro, 
with 130 operating countries (factories in 70+ of them) had lots of 
issues with programs that insisted on producing output (or reading 
input) in whatever their current locale/country specified, vs those that 
would always use US (or even worse: Norwegian) rules.

I've personally written perl scripts to parse/inspect financial 
consolidation reports, figure out the locale rules used and then convert 
to the company standard.

Terje


-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"