Re: Quick note about future number handling

Saturday, March 20, 2010, 9:53:56 AM, Tom Fennelly wrote:

[snip]
> Hi there.
>
> If you wanted to maintain backward compatibility, perhaps you could 
> leave the default as is and provide a method on the 
> Template/Configuration instance for overriding the default formatting.
> Could also do same with a new computer readable default, allowing 
> existing users to override the default back to the old human readable 
> default (which I've also found to be a total PITA :) ).
>
> In fact.... would this be nice to have for all types... including Dates
> etc e.g.
>
>     configuration.setDefaultFormatting(Number.class, "c");
>     configuration.setDefaultFormatting(Date.class, "string('yyyy-MM-dd')");
>     // etc...

You mean, the computer-readable date format should be the ISO format?
Maybe. Too bad you will still need to use ?date/?time/?datetime unless
the date comes from JDBC.

> Actually ... just looked at the API and it appears to already be there
> on the Configuration class i.e. setNumberFormat(String) and 
> setDateFormat(String) :)  Why did I never see that before :)

Well, that thing (also known as the "number_format" setting) is
demonstrated at many places. Anyway... it's not what we need there.
Number format sets that format for *human* audience, and that should
remain so. (You can't easily enforce computer-audience format there...
for starters, the decimal separator may magically becomes from "." to
"," in some locales, like in mine. Then, if you use number format for
that, what is left for human-audience formatting then?) What we should
add is a setting like "default_audience" (setDefaultAudience), which
could be either "computer" or "human" (AUDIENCE_COMPUTER,
AUDIENCE_HUMAN).

But... it doesn't really solve the whole problem about
backward-compatibility. Even if we put aside the cases where templates
from different sources are used together (some was designed with
default_audience="computer" in mind, but some with
default_audience="human"), just think about how much confusion it will
generate. To be on the safe side, you had to specify the audience
everywhere... /-: Anyway, we might still will have to do this. First
introduce the default_audience setting, then in 3.0 change its default
value to "computer".

> Regards,

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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