Re: Locale bikeshed time

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 10:15:51PM +0200, u-igbb@aetey.se wrote:
> Replying to myself.
> 
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 11:06:49AM +0200, u-igbb@aetey.se wrote:
> > Returning to the naming. As language-based locales are named
> > after languages, it would be nice to name other kinds of locale
> > data after their "natural association" too. Then politically-bound
> > data could be put into the corresponding "territorial" family:
> > 
> >  language                ll[l][_TT]
> >  territory               TT[_ll[l]]
> 
> A bad idea, forget it. This would be open to misinterpretation
> (which key is "more fundamental" for a certain kind of data,
> shall it go to ll_TT or TT_ll ?)

Yes, I agree that's a bad idea.

> Somewhat cleaner might be:   ("zxx" and "ZZ" below are literals)
> 
>    no localization                         C
>    language[+territory]                    ll[l][_TT]
>    purely territorial                      zxx_TT   ("no language" code)

While clean and well-defined, I wonder whether zxx_TT is
counter-intuitive to most users...

> and possibly
>    no territory-specific stuff included    ll[l]_ZZ ("no territory" code)
> 
> The last item would e.g. allow treating ll[l] alone as "including
> the most frequently used territorial features for this language"
> (like "sv" == "sv_SE"),
> but I think this approach would be bad and confusing - such a definition
> is not certain nor stable.
> 
> I think that a language code alone should mean "no territory-specific
> stuff included" and nothing else.

I think that's reasonable.

> Then "ll" would be a synonym for "ll_ZZ" and hence "ll_ZZ" will not have
> to exist at all.

That's definitely nice.

> Then the usage would be like
> 
> LANG=de_DE                        (... "€")
> 
> LANG=sv_SE                        (decimal comma, "kr")
> LANG=sv     LC_MONETARY=zxx_SE    (decimal point from "C", iso4217 "SEK")

Changing the numeric radix point is explicitly not supported. :)
LC_NUMERIC is just always C because, well, numbers are numbers, not
something to vary by culture, and changing the radix point just breaks
parsing and storing data for interchange. LC_MONETARY on the other
hand could in principle provide a different monetary radix point, but
it's not terribly useful until we get a full-featured strfmon anyway.

Rich