Re: Locale bikeshed time

["writeonce@midipix.org" <writeonce@midipix.org>]

On 07/23/2014 12:39 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> On that topic, while this is a matter outside my control for 
> individual users, my preference would be that the official musl-locale 
> data attempt to avoid multiple variants/modifiers and legacy options 
> if possible. For example I would like to see the numeric date format 
> be ISO format in all locales, with traditional formats only where the 
> natural-language string representations for months/days are included 
> (and I say this as someone coming from one of the locales, i.e. US, 
> where the traditional numeric date format is non-ISO). In keeping with 
> the principle that musl is "modern" I'd like to prefer modern cultural 
> conventions to historical ones.
For what it's worth, I wanted to point out that the ISO C explicitly 
pertains to the Gregorian calendar only, albeit in parenthesis (N1570, 
7.27.1).  For users of [listed in alphabetical order:] Arabic, Chinese, 
Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, and Tibetan, for instance, there are two 
different issues at stake: the first is the representation of the date 
according to the Gregorian calendar in one's own language, which could 
(~easily~) be made "modern" (ISO compliant), whereas the second is the 
representation of the date according to the culture's native calendar in 
the language matching the current locale.

While I'm not necessary suggesting that musl (or any other libc, for 
that matter) should implement the conversion functions from the 
Gregorian calendar to other calendars and vice versa, it would be nice 
if at least the prototypes of the conversion functions were somehow 
standardized, and also if the locale files likewise accounted for the 
above issues (e.g. in the form of placeholders).

PS. speaking of historical vs. modern and LC_MONETARY, we should 
probably bear in mind the many locale variants that are based on 
currency only, as for example in the case of EU member countries before 
and after the Euro.

zg