Re: Locale bikeshed time

[u-igbb@aetey.se]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 07:47:06PM +0200, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 04:03:27AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > > Well, 2/3 of the world's population is in India and China and they all
> > > use ".", so I think that pretty much covers the question of which is
> > > "more widely used".
> > 
> > Ah indeed. That's a sufficient evidence.

> world is about 7G
> india+china is about 2.5G
> that looks closer to 1/3 than to 2/3

Oops. I should have checked the numbers :)
Thanks for the notice.

> but using anything other than '.' as the decimal point is broken

I am unsure what/which context you mean (say application development,
user settings for the screen, user settings for editing documents to share,
or all scenarios at once?)

Or do you mean to second Rich's opinion that the applicatons' use of
locale facilities is so inconsistent that there is no use of relying on
the lc_numeric?

(I do not have any bias towards any representation of the radix point but
I am happy to learn objective/verifiable arguments for one or another.)

This is hardly important though if (as Rich wrote) "C"/"POSIX" locale is
specified to use "." and given that musl already has a policy of disallowing
other characters.

I apparently missed the discussions which led to this policy,
sorry if I am beating a dead horse:

To prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot looks
considerate. Personally I would nevertheless prefer to have a possibility
to influence the radix dot character, at least as a locale variant
and take the consequences.

If anybody else feels for using "," than so be it in the corresponding
locale, as the default or as a variant - how much would it cost?

The generally "most international" locale I am aware of (eo_ZZ) happens
to need ",". If your population numbers are correct, this seems to be
a proper choice too - modulo broken locale use/deployment.

Actually I very much dislike software which expects that it knows my
situation better than myself and prevents me from doing what I need.

Regards,
Rune