Re: locale, gui vs command line question?

["james morris" <james jwm-art net>]

On 1/2/2010, "Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com> wrote:

> > There's nothing at all wrong with it in the context you specified
> > -- i.e. you want to ensure that floating-point values written to
> > and read from file always use '.' as the decimal separator. I do
> > that in my app, gretl (also for reasons of portability).
>
> The problem would be the potential that the library may have cached locale features under a different 
> locale, wouldn't it?  That could lead to either uninitialised bytes, or buffer overrun.

So what's the point of having a setlocale function which can tell you
the locale in use and/or set a new locale to use if this stuff is going
to be stored in cache and read/write of locale settings is going to
break the library and your program?

Or are you saying the libraries (gtk/mpfr/stdc) I'm using may be caching
the locale and may not heed my changes?

> From personal experience; I've first-use-allocated strings with all the thousands characters, and an array 
> of byte offsets at which to put the higher portions of numbers, and then used a regular floating point 
> format to write the last thousand (sprintf comes to mind).  If the locale were to unexpectedly change to one 
> that uses a multi-byte decimal point, a buffer overrun would certainly occur.  In the opposing case, that 
> same function would likely write out a null character following the number.


Are you talking about a change from outside the program? Say, whichever X
environment changes locale settings (do running programs take notice
then?).


Cheers,
James.


> Could cause quite some stress.
>
>
> Fredderic
>
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