Re: Locale definitions, dots and commas

["Andrew W. Nosenko" <andrew w nosenko gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Carlos Pereira
<jose carlos pereira ist utl pt> wrote:
> Andrew W. Nosenko wrote:
>  > What you need to do indeed:
>  > 1. use locale-dependent formatting in the UI (both for input and output)
>  > 2. use locale-INDEPENDENT formatting when you read and save your data files.
>  So you are saying that interfaces should use dots, commas, whatever is
>  locally defined, but files should always be in dots. I am not sure I
>  agree with this.
>
>  My users are actively encouraged to read and modify XML and other text-based
>  formats, and it looks quite odd to force users to edit files in dots,
>  while at the
>  same time they are allowed to use whatever they like in the interface.

For case of XML you just have no chiose, at least if XML Schema is used.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#decimal
just mandates dots for "decimal" and, as consequence, for "float" and "double".

For another formats text-based formats...  Using of the one and the
same notation will reduce errors.  I remember case when I misread
"12,345" (US notation) as 12.345 instead of "12 tousands 345" just
because my native locale (Russian) uses comma as decimal separator.
And I expect that nearly to all US people just don't recognize
"12 345" as an _one_ decimal number at all (Russian uses space as
tousand separator).

Therefore, cross locale data transfer in an locale dependent format is
a bad thing.

>  Or are you advocating that text file editors should show dot decimal
>  separators
>  as commas, when locale is comma-based?

Of course not! :-)

> apparently that is not the case with
>  Vim and Xemacs, in Gnome, in Fedora 8, I just checked.

-- 
Andrew W. Nosenko <andrew w nosenko gmail com>