std.locale

[Ellery Newcomer]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> 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.

If you don't use it, you don't use it; but please don't ruin it for the 
sake of those of us who will.

I will use it (go Andrei!)
people who have to muck with spreadsheet libraries might use it
people who write spreadsheet libraries might use it

wish I had some good ideas for Andrei, but I can't say as I do.