Re: Locales: An Analysis

 > > `use locale' (or better, its equivalent) should better forget about
 > > C locales.  [...]  Now: please look around.  What nice properties of
 > > your favorite locale will be lost by interpreting it as a hint to
 > > Unicode conversion?
 > 
 > We have to at least provide effective access to C locale features like
 > collation.  Surely _some_ people are using C locales for e.g. sorting

And numeric formatting, so that "3,1415927" is an approximation of the pi.

And that %[aAbB] of POSIX::strftime continue to say ma, måndag, Dez,
décembre as appropriate.  Or is that last one décembre...?

 > words in Russian dictionary order.  And of course those people won't

And, yes, collation, too.  Us Finns would get really mad if
'ä' were sorted after 'a' and before 'b', for example...

The locales are a major pain (I, if anyone, know that) but
unfortunately they solve some problems adequately well.

The only clean way I see out of the locale mess is to replace them
with a clean *Perl-specific* API: what I mean by this is that Perl
distribution itself would contain the necessary locale definitions
(collation, numeric and date formatting, character classes (from
Unicode), et cetera), and the perl core would then use those
definitions.

 > like having a language feature pulled out from under them.
 > -- 
 > Chip Salzenberg          - a.k.a. -           <[email protected]>
 >         "He's Mr. Big of 'Big And Tall' fame."  // MST3K

-- 
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        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen