std.locale

[Georg Wrede]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Sooner or later that will need to be defined. I know next to nothing 
> about locales. (I know I dislike the design C++ uses.)


D uses Utf-8, and that is *good enough*!

This lets my programs "understand" Finnish, and doesn't give me undue 
headaches.


Seriously tending to locale issues would be an *endless swamp*. Just for 
this, I looked up something suitable to read:

http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/perllocale/

It may even be that you would find the time, but think about Walter and 
us, please. There *really are* other things to do.


An excellent string hierarchy without the entire rest of i18n, is only 
going to look like a Ferrari with a Trabant engine. Which is worse than 
nothing at all.

Besides, there's more to this than just designing the perfect, or even a 
good locale system in a language. *Somebody should actually use it*.

Now, the non-English programmer, what does he really want? He wants to 
be able to type stuff into his program in his native character set. D 
already does that, by way of Utf-8.

What else? Well, it is conceivable that he wants his program to print 
dates and times the way it's done over there. He simply writes the 
program "by hand" so it does dates and times like he wants. Even if 
there was a locale thing in the language, he wouldn't bother with the 
hassle. And he couldn't care less about Urdu.

The hypothetical Ambitious Programmer might want to use locale. He could 
then have the dates and times (and currencies, etc.) follow the country. 
Now, that might sound commendable, but in practice it *crumbles*.
He can't possibly know how to deal with languages that are written 
backwards, languages where several characters make one letter, exotic 
ways of writing dates, etc.

So, his fancy i18n project is doomed to be, at most, as usable as the 
"normal" D program. Probably less, since his decisions will actually 
worsen the user experience -- for users in another culture.


And, any project big enough to tackle this, will implement its own 
locale handling anyway. I'm sorry to say.

----

Yes, locales are nice and all.
For D 3.5 that is.
Honestly.