[erlang-questions] [eeps] EEP 35 "Binary string modules" -- locales

[pan+eq@REDACTED]

Hi,

I forwarded this comment (as well) to the EEP mailing list and will answer 
there.

Cheers,
/Patrik

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Christian von Roques wrote:

> Not all text is meant for human consumption.  I'd even venture so far as
> to say that the overwhelming mass of program generated text is not for
> human consumption, its intended consumers are other programs.  The most
> common locale programs "speak" is the default "C" (also called "POSIX")
> locale.  It is complicated to solve the general problem of supporting
> all human locales.  It is much simpler to just support a default locale.
> Even programs intended to create/consume text for humans often have to
> create/consume text in the C locale as well.
>
> I've been told the anecdote that in the 70s a delegation of IBM compiler
> engineers flew to Germany to proudly demonstrate their new optimizing
> Fortran compiler and all it did was spew gibberish and crash because it
> used the standard routines for reading/writing numbers, which in Germany
> used commas for dots and dots for commas due to the then new locale
> awareness of the OS.  Since then I've been convinced that it is a good
> thing to have two separate sets of functions, one small, simple, and
> fast handling only the default locale and another one huge, complicated,
> and not so fast trying to handle all the intricacies of as many locales
> as feasible.
>
> Therefore I'd like to see to_integer and to_float in bstring, grokking
> numbers in the C locale.  to_lower and to_upper too as long as it's
> documented on which characters they are working on.  They wouldn't even
> need to know if the bstring was iso8859-1 or utf-8 encoded as long as
> they only touch ASCII characters.
>
> I don't think it's practical to see bstring as locale independent.
> Rather bstring should be seen as operating in the default locale.  One
> being able to imagine a locale dependent variant of a function should
> not be ground for omitting the function from bstring.  I can even
> imagine concat(<<"Fuß">>, <<"Ball">>) being expected to result in
> <<"Fussball">> in the DE_de locale.
>
> 	Christian.
>
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